In die-casting molds, heat-checking is the typical failure mechanism. Optimizing the parameters that decrease this failure venture should be considered when designing and heat treating steels. The quality of die steels and their treatment continue to improve. This research investigated properties of the traditional materials 1.2343 and 1.2344 and the new steels (Dievar and TOOLOX 44) when applied to the die-casting mold specimens, after different experimental cycles. Also microstructures of the mentioned materials were analyzed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) test. Chrome-molybdenum-silicon-vanadium steels have good hardening ability in oil and in air. Therefore, the hot-work steels have considerable toughness and plastic attributes through both regular and higher temperatures. So, it is a good traditional die-casting material. However, another special die steel, such as Dievar, is a particularly developed steel grade; its exclusivity profile is exceptional due to its chemical composition and the use of the latest production techniques. Dievar has good heat-checking and gross-cracking resistance as a result of both high toughness and good hot strength. An additional material, a new prehardened tool steel known as TOOLOX 44, exhibits control of the failure described above by optimizing the parameters of impact toughness that could reduce the heat-checking failures. A variety of heat treatment parameters exist for various reasons because the heat treatment operation is performed by a variety of companies. This issue of the diversity in heat treatments is resolved by TOOLOX 44; this steel is quenched and tempered in delivered state.

This research examines the beneficial contributions of project management to manage the cost and schedule of construction projects providing higher accuracy and reliability levels. The study depended on two main research approaches quantitative (online survey questionnaires) and qualitative (interviews) research techniques. The questionnaires and interviews aim to predict the importance of BIM technology in managing the cost and schedule of construction projects. Also, a third research method is employed, which represents a case study of a building, to make a comparison in terms of accuracy, effort, and budget of quantity take-off between manual (hand calculations) and numerical (REVIT Software estimations) approaches. The results revealed that adopting project management principles could significantly cut considerable budget, time, and effort to execute and complete construction projects. Also, project management is vital to prevent any financial losses or resource problems resulting from cost overruns or delays. Moreover, the results indicated that using modern project management techniques (including BIM technology and REVIT Software) could support engineers and project managers calculate the cost and schedule of their projects more accurately, avoiding errors. Besides, the results confirmed that using the REVIT software could aid project managers and civil engineers in evaluating the budget and time required to accomplish the construction project with less effort, time, and cost and provide a lower number of human errors compared with hand calculations. It was found that the manual and numerical results are greatly approximate to each other. Still, the results of the REVIT software offered more significant precision because of the accuracy in the modeling and the few engineers’ mistakes in calculating quantities manually.

Since the earthquakes in Northridge and Kobe in 1994 and 1995, respectively, many investigations have been carried out towards improving the strength and ductility of steel beam to column pre‐ and post‐Northridge connections. In order to achieve these objectives, recent researches are mainly focused on three principles: reducing the beam section to improve the beam ductility, adding different kinds of slit damper to beam and column flanges to absorb and dissipate the input earthquake energy in the connection and strengthening the connection area using additional elements such as rib plates, cover plates, and flange plates to keep the plastic hinges away from the column face. This paper presents a reduced beam section approach via the introduction of multilongitudinal voids (MLV) in the beam web for various beam depths varying from 450 mm to 912 mm. ANSYS finite element program was used to simulate the three different sizes of SAC sections: SAC3, SAC5, and SAC7. Results showed an improvement in the connection ductility since the input energy was dissipated uniformly along the beam length and the total rotation of the connection was over four percent radian.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has brought about a qualitative change in the design and management of construction projects because it represents a digital simulation of the physical characteristics of the building, and this increases its efficiency before the actual construction begins. In Iraq, most construction projects still use CAD two-dimensional drawing for the purpose of the implementation process, especially government projects, and this causes many problems due to the difficulty of communication between the various disciplines involved in the design and misunderstanding during implementation. This type of problem is reduced by combining BIM drawings prepared by designers and making them into a single model. In this process of merging conflicts are found using BIM tools such as Autodesk Navisworks. There are three main types of detections. This article includes how a clash detector can help improve clashes in the design phase before starting to construct a specific building using BIM applications and focuses on hard detection type (overlap of a particular element with else). The methodology involved in this research is to study an educational building (24-classroom model school) consisting of structural and architectural BIM models only, clash detection analysis is done using Autodesk Revit and Autodesk Navisworks Manage software.