As one type of heating furnaces, the electric heating furnace (EHF) typically suffers from time delay, non-linearity, time-varying parameters, system uncertainties, and harsh en-vironment of the furnace, which significantly deteriorate the temperature control process of the EHF system. In order to achieve accurate and robust temperature tracking performance, an integration of robust state feedback control (RSFC) and a novel sliding mode-based disturbance observer (SMDO) is proposed in this paper, where modeling errors and external disturbances are lumped as a lumped disturbance. To describe the characteristics of the EHF, by using convection laws, an integrated dynamic model is established and identified as an uncertain nonlinear second ord

The hydraulic conditions of a flow previously proved to be changed when placing large-scale geometric roughness elements on the bed of an open channel. These elements impose more resistance to the flow.  The geometry of the roughness elements, the numbers used, and the configuration are parameters that can affect the hydraulic flow characteristics. The target is to use inclined block elements to control the salt wedge propagation pointed in most estuaries to prevent its negative effects. The Computational Fluid Dynamics CFD Software was used to simulate the two-phase flow in an estuary model. In this model, the used block elements are 2 cm by 3 cm cross-sections with an inclined face in the flow direction, with a length

This paper presents an experimental study of cooling photovoltaic (PV) panels using evaporative cooling. Underground (geothermal energy) water used to extract heat from it during cooling and cleaning of PV panels. An experimental test rig was constructed and tested under hot and dusty climate conditions in Baghdad. An active cooling system was used with auxiliary an underground water tank to provide cold water as a coolant over both PV surfaces to reduce its temperature. The cellulose pad has been arranged on the back surface and sprays cooling on the front side. Two identical PV panels modules used: without cooling and evaporative water cooling. The experiments are comprised of four cases: Case (I): backside cooling, Ca

 Data Driven Requirement Engineering (DDRE) represents a vision for a shift from the static traditional methods of doing requirements engineering to dynamic data-driven user-centered methods. Data available and the increasingly complex requirements of system software whose functions can adapt to changing needs to gain the trust of its users, an approach is needed in a continuous software engineering process. This need drives the emergence of new challenges in the discipline of requirements engineering to meet the required changes. The problem in this study was the method in data discrepancies which resulted in the needs elicitation process being hampered and in the end software development found discrepancies and could not meet the need

Background Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) is widely used in the cancer therapy field. This type of plasma is very close to room temperature. This paper illustrates the effects of CAP on breast cancer tissues both in vivo and in vitro. Methods The mouse mammary adenocarcinoma cell line AN3 was used for the in vivo study, and the MCF7, AMJ13, AMN3, and HBL cell lines were used for the in vitro study. A floating electrode-dielectric barrier discharge (FE-DBD) system was used. The cold plasma produced by the device was tested against breast cancer cells. Results The induced cytotoxicity percentages were 61.7%, 68% and 58.07% for the MCF7, AMN3, and AMJ13 cell lines, respectively, whereas the normal breast tissue HBL cell line exhibited very li

Smear zone is usually formed around the prefabricated vertical drains (PVD’s) due to mandrel driving. The geotechnical properties of the soil in this zone exhibit significant changes that affect the performance of the PVD’s. The most relevant property in this respect is the coefficient of permeability. So far, no serious attention is paid to investigate the effects of shearing under large shear strains on the geotechnical properties of the soft soil in Fao region. In this study, an extensive laboratory testing program was conducted to assess the characteristics of the smear zone with an emphasis on the permeability coefficient of Fao soft soil. The results show that the permeability of the smear zone is about 70% of

A rapid, sensitive and without extraction spectrophotometric method for determination of clonazepam (CLO) in pure and pharmaceutical dosage forms has been described. The proposed method was simply depended on charge transfer reaction between reduced CLO (n-donor) and metol (N-methyl-p-aminophenol sulfate) as a chromogenic reagent (π- acceptor). The reduced drug, with zinc and concentrated hydrochloric acid, produced a purple colored soluble charge-transfer complex with metol in the presence of sodium metaperiodate in neutral medium, which has been measured at λmax 532 nm. All the variables which affected the developed and the stability of the colored product such as concentration of reagent and oxidant, temperature and time of rea

Spatial data observed on a group of areal units is common in scientific applications. The usual hierarchical approach for modeling this kind of dataset is to introduce a spatial random effect with an autoregressive prior. However, the usual Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme for this hierarchical framework requires the spatial effects to be sampled from their full conditional posteriors one-by-one resulting in poor mixing. More importantly, it makes the model computationally inefficient for datasets with large number of units. In this article, we propose a Bayesian approach that uses the spectral structure of the adjacency to construct a low-rank expansion for modeling spatial dependence. We propose a pair of computationally efficient estimati