Hearing impairment is a major public health problem in Nepal. The present service delivery, however, is mainly hospital based and is limited to large towns. Those people residing in rural areas lack many basic needs including ear care services. The collaborative community volunteer-based ear care pilot programme implemented in Banke, Nepal aims to reach out to those rural areas by establishing sustainable primary ear care services, empowering and utilizing local resources. The focus of the programme is to promote multi-sector improvement in sanitation, nutrition, immunization, breast-feeding and timely care and support to ear patients to help prevent hearing impairment mainly from the sequelae of otitis media.
Engineered cementitious composites (ECC) is a class of high-performance fiber-reinforced cementitious composites featuring metal-like strain-hardening behavior under tension and high ductility. The highly ductile behavior of ECC often results in high impact resistance and energy absorption capacity, which make ECC suitable for applications in structures that are prone to impact damages, like exterior bridge girders, bridge piers, and crash barriers. In a recent study, a new ECC mixture has been developed using domestically available polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) fibers and regular river sand in replacement of imported PVA fibers and fine silica sand that are normally used in other ECC mixtures. The newly developed mixture, with improved local accessibility of raw materials, enables structural-scale applications of ECC in transportation infrastructures. To evaluate the suitability of the mixture for impact-resistant structures, in this paper, the tensile and flexural behavior of the newly developed material were characterized under pseudo-static loading and high strain-rate loadings up to 10−1 s−1. Direct drop-weight impact test was also conducted to assess the impact resistance and energy absorption capacity of the material. It was ensured that the ECC mixture maintains high tensile strain capacity above 1.8% under all tested strain rates. Regarding the damage characteristics, energy absorption capacity and load-bearing capacity during repeated impact loadings, ECC was found to have 75% higher energy dissipation capacity compared with regular reinforced concrete specimens and superior damage tolerance. The research results demonstrated that the newly developed ECC has a great potential to improve the impact resistance of transportation infrastructures.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.