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This paper presents an investigation on lightweight foamed concrete (LFC) with different type of additives. LFC with 600, 1000 and 1400 kg/m3 density were cast and tested. Fly ash, lime and polypropylene fibre were used on each density with different percentages. All the additives effects were compared with normal LFC as control mix. Mechanical properties of LFC were evaluated with several tests up to 180 days. The results show that the drying shrinkage, compressive strength and flexural strength are affected by the hydration process of each additive in the harden LFC. Fly ash as pozzolanic material helps to strengthen the LFC, though it needs longer curing period to achieve ultimate strength. Lime gives slight contribution to strength as detail investigation on microstructure formation will give clear answer on how the mechanical properties were affected. The addition of polypropylene contributes to flexural strength and shrinkage of LFC. Polypropylene fibre only contributes to compressive strength at low LFC density.

Body armor is a material to protect body from injury of various kind of high speed projectile impact velocity in combat or other dangerous situation. Researchers were found to actively research and exploring new body armor technology due to the invention of new firearms. Furthermore, they were also competing in developing ballistic panel which is lighter in weight, more flexible and comfort in use, cheaper in cost and manufacturability. This paper reviews the body armor commercial and current development materials, structure and construction techniques involved and related works on enhancing ballistic energy absorption.

Introduction to Stochastic Differential Equations. Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 114. By T. C. Gard. ISBN 0 8247 7776 X. Dekker, New York, 1988. xii + 234 pp. Priced separately for individuals and groups.

The present study covers the use of fibre in lightweight foamed concrete (LFC) to produce the lightweight concrete for use in construction of non-load bearing elements. LFC with 600, 1000 and 1400 kg/m3 density were cast and tested. Polypropylene fibres with different percentage were used into LFC and the resulting products were compared to normal LFC. Compressive strength, flexural strength and drying shrinkage tests were carried out to evaluate the mechanical properties up to 180 days. The addition of fibres in LFC showed no contribution on compressive strength but improvement in the flexural and shrinkage test results.

In this article, we extended the existing explicit Taylor method and modified it to gain a new explicit Taylor-liked method in solving stiff differential equations. We also considered the stability property for this method since the stability property of the classical explicit fourth order Runge-Kutta (RK4) method is not adequate for the solution of stiff problems. Implicit methods could work well for stiff problems but have certain drawbacks especially when discussing about the cost. A comparison of the existing implicit Adam-Bashforth, the classical explicit (RK4) and the new explicit Taylor-liked method is presented.

Abstract. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is a well known swarm intelligence algorithms which have been shown to perform competitively with respect to other population-based algorithms. However, this algorithm has poor exploitation ability. To address this issue, constrained Artificial Bee Colony (cABC) algorithm is proposed where three new solution search equations are introduced respectively to employed bee, onlooker bee and scout bee phases. This algorithm is tested on several constrained benchmark problems. The numerical results demonstrate that the cABC is competitive with other state-of-the-art constrained ABC algorithms under consideration.

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