A compact microstrip six-port reflectometer (SPR) with extended bandwidth is proposed in this paper. The design is based on using 16-dB multi-section coupled line directional couplers and a multi-section 3-dB Wilkinson power divider operating from 1 to 6 GHz. The proposed SPR employs only two calibration standards: a matched load and an open load. As compared to other dielectric substrates, fabricating the proposed SPR involves using a low-cost (FR4) substrate. A novel algorithm is also proposed to estimate the complex reflection coefficient over the frequency ranges at which the standard performance of the circuit components is not fully satisfied. The new algorithm is based on the circles’ intersection points, which have been de

Abstract:

     This study aims to identify the level of patients’ satisfaction among a sample of hospitalized patients in the targeted hospital (Al-Kindy Teaching Hospital, and Al-Yarmook Teaching Hospital). Moreover, this study highlights the reality of services for patients, especially in the targeted governmental teaching hospitals. The Patient Satisfaction with Nursing Care (PSNCS) has been measured in these hospitals through the revised scale by Tang et al, (2013).This scale includes four major domains; Health Information (5 items), Influencing Support (4 items), Decision Control (4 items), Specialized Technical Competence (7 items). The method of surveying patients’ opinions about the degree

This paper reports a numerical study of flow behaviors and natural convection heat transfer characteristics in an inclined open-ended square cavity filled with air. The cavity is formed by adiabatic top and bottom walls and partially heated vertical wall facing the opening. Governing equations in vorticity-stream function form are discretized via finite-difference method and are solved numerically by iterative successive under relaxation (SUR) technique. A computer program to solve mathematical model has been developed and written as a code for MATLAB software. Results in the form of streamlines, isotherms, and average Nusselt number, are obtained for a wide range of Rayleigh numbers 10³-10⁶ with Prandtl number 0.71

Flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP) is one of the instances in flexible manufacturing systems. It is considered as a very complex to control. Hence generating a control system for this problem domain is difficult. FJSP inherits the job-shop scheduling problem characteristics. It has an additional decision level to the sequencing one which allows the operations to be processed on any machine among a set of available machines at a facility. In this article, we present Artificial Fish Swarm Algorithm with Harmony Search for solving the flexible job shop scheduling problem. It is based on the new harmony improvised from results obtained by artificial fish swarm algorithm. This improvised solution is sent to comparison to an overall best

Background: Obesity is considered an important risk factor for periodontal disease. It has been reported that reactive oxygen species linking both diseases, systemic melatonin supplementation as antioxidant therapy, was addressed as an adjuvant to scaling and root surface debridement (SRP) to enhance the treatment of periodontitis. Objective: To investigate the efficacy of systemic melatonin administration in periodontitis-obese patients as an adjuvant to scaling and root surface debridement (SRP). Methods: A randomized clinical trial was conducted at a dental-specialized center. Eighty subjects were included and allocated into group-I: twenty periodontium-healthy, normal-weight people; group-II: 30 obese patients with stage-III tre

In this paper, we establish the conditions of the occurrence of the local bifurcations, such as saddle node, transcritical and pitchfork, of all equilibrium points of an eco-epidemiological model consisting of a prey-predator model with SI (susceptible-infected) epidemic diseases in prey population only and a refuge-stage structure in the predators. It is observed that there is a transcritical bifurcation near the axial and free predator equilibrium points, near disease-free equilibrium point is a saddle-node bifurcation and near positive (coexistence) equilibrium point is a saddle-node bifurcation, a transcritical bifurcation and a pitchfork bifurcation. Further investigations for Hopf bifurcation near coexistence equilibrium point

Proxy-based sliding mode control PSMC is an improved version of PID control that combines the features of PID and sliding mode control SMC with continuously dynamic behaviour. However, the stability of the control architecture maybe not well addressed. Consequently, this work is focused on modification of the original version of the proxy-based sliding mode control PSMC by adding an adaptive approximation compensator AAC term for vibration control of an Euler-Bernoulli beam. The role of the AAC term is to compensate for unmodelled dynamics and make the stability proof more easily. The stability of the proposed control algorithm is systematically proved using Lyapunov theory. Multi-modal equation of motion is derived using the Galerkin metho