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This study aims to show the dyeing behaviour of polyester fabrics using four novel heterocyclic disperse dyes.

The four dyes were synthesized based on 5, 5'-(1, 4-phenylene) bis (1, 3, 4-thiadiazol-2-amine) as a diazonium compound. The UV/Vis absorption spectroscopic data of these disperse dyes while dyeing polyester fabrics were investigated. Following this, the dyeing properties of these dyes on polyester fabrics were investigated under acid condition.

The results showed that increasing the dyeing temperature from 80°C to 100°C led to an increase in dye uptake for all dyes, but further increases of the temperature to 130°C led to higher dye uptake for dye 3 as the dye exhaustion increased by about 50% from 55.9% to 91.4%.

This study is important as it introduces new dyes for the dyeing of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) fibres with colours that range from yellowish orange to bluish yellow and scarlet red and all with excellent brightness, levelness and depth of shade.

The purpose of this paper is to draw a map of the general features of epistemological and critical concerns in contemporary Islamic philosophy. This study will not be confined to the domain of academic philosophy or to those who are professionals in the field of philosophy.

The paper adopted the critical rational approach in dealing with contemporary Islamic philosophy in the Arab world. The scope will include scholars from different fields of epistemology who tried to present a “vision” of the attitude that should be adopted in facing the challenges of the age and the problems of the nation on the epistemological level or the political, economic and social levels.

There is a need for a philosophy of action and progress rather than a philosophy that is based on abstract ideas and theories and of words/rhetoric. The ethics required to accomplish this ought to identify the attributes of the citizen who can reach self-actualization through legitimate means based on a progress agenda with theoretical and philosophical foundations.

Because a critical rational approach can be dealt with from different perspectives, this paper will adopt the classification of the principal intellectual trends: the reformist, secular and liberal.

This paper covers a long time span to determine whether the philosophical projects have been effective.

This paper, which criticizes the philosophic projects that are theoretically unsound and that do not address real social problems (like poverty), argues the need for a philosophy of progress and action. This will lead to devising an agenda that addresses the challenges the society is facing and to finding alternative and creative solutions resulting in development.

Skewed pricing is a typical tactic used by tenderers in unit price projects to gain additional advantages at the expense of the owner or other competing tenderers. This paper aims to describe the development of a model for detecting skewed pricing in competitive tendering for unit price contracts.

The model evaluates how much the offered unit rates for work items deviate from the reasonable rate identified from the item’s submitted unit rates. Item rate deviations are integrated into a total deviation score for each submitted tender based on the relative weight of the work item to the total project amount. The model allows for assigning higher weights to work items that are more prone to skewed pricing, such as those that are performed early and those that are expected to experience quantity fluctuations.

The paper presents a detection model that uses only the submitted prices of the competing tenderers to perform the needed calculations, which reduces subjectivity in identifying skewed tenders. Two examples are given to demonstrate how the model may be used to detect skewed tenders.

The model supports tendering officials in the challenging task of identifying skewed tenders, which is required by rules and regulations governing public procurement. The model’s ease of use is expected to make it more widely used as a decision-support tool during the tender evaluation stage of real-world projects.

This study aims to compare the performance of two nature-inspired metaheuristics inside Grasshopper in optimizing daylighting and energy performance against brute force in terms of the resemblance to ideal solution and calculation time.

The simulation-based optimization process was controlled using two population-based metaheuristic algorithms, namely, the genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The objectives of the optimization routine were optimizing daylighting and energy consumption of a standard reference office while varying the urban context configuration in Alexandria, Egypt.

The results from the GA and PSO were compared to those from brute force. The GA and PSO demonstrated much faster performance to converge to design solution after conducting only 25 and 43% of the required simulation runs, respectively. Also, the average proportion of the resulted weighted sum optimization (WSO) per case using the GA and PSO to that from brute force algorithm was 85 and 95%, respectively.

The work of this paper goes beyond the current practices for showing that the performance of the optimization algorithm can differ by changing the urban context configuration while solving the same problem under the same design variables and objectives.