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Though historically waqf played an important role in providing variety of social services in Muslim societies, its position has diminished significantly during contemporary times. The paper assesses the latent status of waqf by examining the legal constraints that waqf faces relative to other non-profit organizations. While Shariah principles and national laws affect the nature of waqf in contemporary nation states, the latter ultimately determines the legal requirements of establishment and operations of waqf institutions in different jurisdictions. Taking Bangladesh and The Gambia as case studies, the non-profit laws in general and waqf in particular are examined to identify the legal constraints that inhibit the establishment of waqf in these countries. The paper argues that either the absence or inefficiency of waqf laws can induce contemporary Islamic non-profit organizations to opt for organizational formats other than waqf. To mitigate the legal constraints, the paper argues the enactment of efficient waqf laws that reflect contemporary flexible Shariah rulings on the one hand and removing legal asymmetries between the waqf laws and other non-profit organizational laws on the other hand.

Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) of civil infrastructure has been an active area of research for the past few decades. Traditional inspection of civil infrastructure, mostly relying on visual inspection is time-consuming, labor-intensive and often provides subjective and erroneous results. To facilitate this process, different sensors for data collection and techniques for data analyses have been used to effectively carry out this task in an automated manner. The purpose of this research is to provide a novel Deep Learning-based method for detection of steel rebars in reinforced concrete bridge elements using data from Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). At the same time, a novel technique is proposed for the localization of rebar in B-scan images. In order to examine the performance of the rebar detection and localization system, results are outlined to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system within relevant practical applications.

Reduction Line 5 in Aluminium Bahrain (ALBA) was started up in 2005 with a capacity of 305kt per year. The operating performance of Line-5 has been one of the best among all AP 30 reduction lines. It has been operating at 386 kA with different lining design as part of upgrading the line to operate close to 400 kA. On 5th April 2017, all Alba reduction lines encountered a long power outage due to a power blackout. After this outage, another three hours of power shutdown was required to weld emergency busbars after an open circuit incident in one of the Line 5 pots caused by anode clad failure. These unforeseen events caused the potline to freeze and 274 pots had to be stopped out of the 336 pots that were in operation. Alba has demonstrated extensive resilience and in-depth technical know-how in recovering these pots in one of the fastest and safest recovery in the aluminium smelting industry. This paper describes the steps and procedures put in place to achieve such a milestone.

Aluminium Bahrain has developed in-house an alloy called “ALBA HIGH SPEED 6063.10”, which is a variant of alloy AA 6063. The driving force behind this has been the ever standing requirement of extruders to attain progressively higher extrusion speeds, thereby boosting productivity. Small and controlled amounts of Mn and Mg additions to alloy AA 6063 were found to help in improving extrusion speeds and reduce die pick-up thereby improving the surface appearance. The reason was attributed to improved beta to alpha phase transformation rates at the microstructure level. This was achieved by having tight control of Mn addition to reduce the band from 0 % — 0.10 % in normal AA6063 alloy to 0.03% — 0.06 % in 6063.10. In addition controlling the Mg addition to 0.45 % — 0.51 % in the new alloy, assisted in better distribution of Mg2Si precipitates in the matrix during the cooling process, post soaking at 580 °C.