Dam and powerhouse operation sustainability is a major concern from the hydraulic engineering perspective. Powerhouse operation is one of the main sources of vibrations in the dam structure and hydropower plant; thus, the evaluation of turbine performance at different water pressures is important for determining the sustainability of the dam body. Draft tube turbines run under high pressure and suffer from connection problems, such as vibrations and pressure fluctuation. Reducing the pressure fluctuation and minimizing the principal stress caused by undesired components of water in the draft tube turbine are ongoing problems that must be resolved. Here, we conducted a comprehensive review of studies performed on dams, powerhouses, and turbine vibration, focusing on the vibration of two turbine units: Kaplan and Francis turbine units. The survey covered several aspects of dam types (e.g., rock and concrete dams), powerhouse analysis, turbine vibrations, and the relationship between dam and hydropower plant sustainability and operation. The current review covers the related research on the fluid mechanism in turbine units of hydropower plants, providing a perspective on better control of vibrations. Thus, the risks and failures can be better managed and reduced, which in turn will reduce hydropower plant operation costs and simultaneously increase the economical sustainability. Several research gaps were found, and the literature was assessed to provide more insightful details on the studies surveyed. Numerous future research directions are recommended.
Staphylococcus aureus is a common pathogenic agent due to its ability to cause various types of infections, ranging from mild skin infections to sever systemic diseases. One of the most virulence factors of this bacterium is its ability to from biofilms on solid surfaces by anchoring the planktonic cells and by producing a protective layer of extra polymeric substances. Biofilm formation is controlled through many genes. The most important ones are icaA and icaD. Dentures are prosthetic devices that are made of different materials to replace lost teeth. The aim of this study is to examine the ability of different types of denture materials to support the biofilm formation of S. aureus at phenotypic level by detecting ba
... Show MoreBackground: Postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV) are one of the most common complaints following laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
Objective: This study was designed to compare the effects of dexamethasone, metoclopramide, and their combination on preventing PONV in patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
Methods: A total of 135 patients enrolled in the study. American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) physical status I and II patients were included in this randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled study. Patients were randomly assigned to group A administered 8mg iv dexamethasone, group B received metoclopramide 10 mg, group C received combination of 8mg de
... Show MoreThis study investigated athletic Affiliation among male and female racket sports players (tennis, table tennis, and badminton). Athletic Affiliation Scale designed by (El-Shahat, 2021). The problem of the study comes from the extent to which players are affiliated with these sports. The researchers identified the scientific foundations of the scale. After verifying its validity, a random sample was selected from the Baghdad Governorate, including (49) players for the main experiment and (10) players for the pilot sample, distributed among the three sports from the original community 140 players (male and female) registered in the official federations of the games. The researchers adopted a descriptive approach using the survey metho
... Show MoreThe importance of forecasting has emerged in the economic field in order to achieve economic growth, as forecasting is one of the important topics in the analysis of time series, and accurate forecasting of time series is one of the most important challenges in which we seek to make the best decision. The aim of the research is to suggest the use of hybrid models for forecasting the daily crude oil prices as the hybrid model consists of integrating the linear component, which represents Box Jenkins models and the non-linear component, which represents one of the methods of artificial intelligence, which is long short term memory (LSTM) and the gated recurrent unit (GRU) which represents deep learning models. It was found that the proposed h
... Show MoreBackground: Obesity increases the host’s susceptibility by modulating the immune and inflammatory systems in a manner that predisposes to inflammatory tissue destruction and leaves an individual at greater risk of periodontitis. Melatonin is a pineal secretory product involved in numerous actions, such as regulation of internal biological clocks and energy metabolism, and it functions as an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory agent. There exists a substantial amount of evidence supporting the beneficial effect of melatonin supplementation on obesity and its complications. Aim of the study: To investigate the effects of systemic melatonin intake on periodontal health status and lipid profiles in obese periodontitis patients. Subjects and met
... Show MoreIn this study, an analysis of the synoptic characteristics, causes and mechanisms of Kahlaa tornado event was carried out. This tornado occurred on 10:30 UTC (1:30 pm Iraq Local Time) on 14 April 2016 to the north of Kahlaa town in Maysan governorate. We analyzed surface and upper charts, weather conditions, the damage indices, the dynamical features and the instability of the tornado. The analysis showed that there was a low pressure system which was an extension of the Monsoon low in addition to a supercell thunderstorm and a jet stream aloft. The cold trough and high relative vorticity at 500 hPa level, the humid warm wind blowing from the south and the dry cold wind from the north contributed to the initiation of the tornado. Accordi
... Show MoreOne of the goals of adding adjuvants to agricultural spray solutions is to enhance the droplet size characteristics of this spray. Droplet size, in turn, has an influence in the deposited spray quality, in addition to the drift and losses of spray to off-target places. The aim of this research was to evaluate the effect of adding adjuvants to two types of water from different sources on the droplet size characteristics. Two types of adjuvants were employed in the tests: the active substance content of the first adjuvant was a 50% aqueous solution of sodium salt of alkylbenzenesulfonic acid—10% (HY), whereas the second was from rapeseed oil (natural origin)—85% (OL). Both adjuvants were tested in two concentrations: the first was
... Show MoreIn this paper, an efficient method for compressing color image is presented. It allows progressive transmission and zooming of the image without need to extra storage. The proposed method is going to be accomplished using cubic Bezier surface (CBI) representation on wide area of images in order to prune the image component that shows large scale variation. Then, the produced cubic Bezier surface is subtracted from the image signal to get the residue component. Then, bi-orthogonal wavelet transform is applied to decompose the residue component. Both scalar quantization and quad tree coding steps are applied on the produced wavelet sub bands. Finally, adaptive shift coding is applied to handle the remaining statistical redundancy and attain e
... Show More