The health of Roadway pavement surface is considered as one of the major issues for safe driving. Pavement surface condition is usually referred to micro and macro textures which enhances the friction between the pavement surface and vehicular tires, while it provides a proper drainage for heavy rainfall water. Measurement of the surface texture is not yet standardized, and many different techniques are implemented by various road agencies around the world based on the availability of equipment’s, skilled technicians’ and funds. An attempt has been made in this investigation to model the surface macro texture measured from sand patch method (SPM), and the surface micro texture measured from out flow time (OFT) and British pendul

This paper proposes a new structure of the hybrid neural controller based on the identification model for nonlinear systems. The goal of this work is to employ the structure of the Modified Elman Neural Network (MENN) model into the NARMA-L2 structure instead of Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) model in order to construct a new hybrid neural structure that can be used as an identifier model and a nonlinear controller for the SISO linear or nonlinear systems. Weight parameters of the hybrid neural structure with its serial-parallel configuration are adapted by using the Back propagation learning algorithm. The ability of the proposed hybrid neural structure for nonlinear system has achieved a fast learning with minimum number

Iraq has the second largest proven oil reserves in the world. According to oil experts, it is expected that the Iraq's reserves to rise to 200+ billion barrels of high-grade crude.

Oil is a strategic commodity for producing and exporting countries in general, and Iraq in particular, as demonstrated by the international experience that oil is an important means to achieve economic growth, an important tool in the overall economic, social and political development. It is also an important source of hard currency for any national economy and a means to connect the local economy and the global economy. In this paper we focus our attention on selecting the best regression model that explain the effect of human capita

Four simply supported reinforced concrete (RC) beams were test experimentaly and analyzed using the extended finite element method (XFEM). This method is used to treat the discontinuities resulting from the fracture process and crack propagation in that occur in concrete. The Meso-Scale Approach (MSA) used to model concrete as a heterogenous material consists of a three-phasic material (coarse aggregate, mortar, and air voids in the cement paste). The coarse aggregate that was used in the casting of these beams rounded and crashed aggregate shape with maximum size of 20 mm. The compressive strength used in these beams is equal to 17 MPa and 34 MPa, respectively. These RC beams are designed to fail due to flexure when subjected to lo

This contribution investigates structural, electronic, and optical properties of cubic barium titanate (BaTiO3) perovskites using first-principles calculations of density functional theory (DFT). Generalized gradient approximations (GGA) alongside with PW91 functional have been implemented for the exchange–correlation potential. The obtained results display that BaTiO3 exhibits a band gap of 3.21 eV which agrees well with the previously experimental and theoretical literature. Interestingly, our results explore that when replacing Pd atom with Ba and Ti atoms at 0.125 content a clear decrease in the electronic band gap of 1.052 and 1.090 eV located within the visible range of electromagnetic wavelengths (EMW). Optical parameters such as a

The reinforced concrete column is designed to have a nominal axial resistance. Under different conditions like errors in design, and changing the use of the building from residential to public or storage (extra live loads), the reinforced concrete column will not be able to sustain the desired applied load, and the strengthening is required. This paper presents a finite element model to simulate and investigate the behavior of adding steel jacket to a preloaded and non-damaged reinforced concrete column. Depending on the loading state of the non-strengthened reinforced concrete column and the purpose of adding the steel jacket, two possible cases have been studied. In the first case, which is suitable to investigate the reinforced c

Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) is a multiple-access technique allowing multiusers to share the same communication resources, increasing spectral efficiency and throughput. NOMA has been shown to provide significant performance gains over orthogonal multiple access (OMA) regarding spectral efficiency and throughput. In this paper, two scenarios of NOMA are analyzed and simulated, involving two users and multiple users (four users) to evaluate NOMA's performance. The simulated results indicate that the achievable sum rate for the two users’ scenarios is 16.7 (bps/Hz), while for the multi-users scenario is 20.69 (bps/Hz) at transmitted power of 25 dBm. The BER for two users’ scenarios is 0.004202 and 0.001564 for