The clayey soils have the capability to swell and shrink with the variation in moisture content. Soil stabilization is a well-known technique, which is implemented to improve the geotechnical properties of soils. The massive quantities of waste materials are resulting from modern industry methods create disposal hazards in addition to environmental problems. The steel industry has a waste that can be used with low strength and weak engineering properties soils. This study is carried out to evaluate the effect of steel slag (SS) as a by-product of the geotechnical properties of clayey soil. A series of laboratory tests were conducted on natural and stabilized soils. SS was added by 0, 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20% to the soil.

Text based-image clustering (TBIC) is an insufficient approach for clustering related web images. It is a challenging task to abstract the visual features of images with the support of textual information in a database. In content-based image clustering (CBIC), image data are clustered on the foundation of specific features like texture, colors, boundaries, shapes. In this paper, an effective CBIC) technique is presented, which uses texture and statistical features of the images. The statistical features or moments of colors (mean, skewness, standard deviation, kurtosis, and variance) are extracted from the images. These features are collected in a one dimension array, and then genetic algorithm (GA) is applied for image clustering.

Joining tissue is a growing problem in surgery with the advancement of the technology and more precise and difficult surgeries are done. Tissue welding using laser is a promising technique that might help in more advancement of the surgical practice. Objectives: To study the ability of laser in joining tissues and the optimum parameters for yielding good welding of tissues. Methods: An in-vitro study, done at the Institute of Laser, Baghdad University during the period from October 2008 to February 2009. Diode and Nd-YAG lasers were applied, using different sessions, on sheep small intestine with or without solder to obtain welding of a 2-mm length full thickness incision. Different powers and energies were used to get maximum effect. Re

In modern hydraulic control systems, the trend in hydraulic power applications is to improve efficiency and performance. “Proportional valve” is generally applied to pressure, flow and directional-control valves which continuously convert a variable input signal into a smooth and proportional hydraulic output signal. It creates a variable resistance (orifice) upstream and downstream of a hydraulic actuator, and is meter in/meter out circuit and hence pressure drop, and power losses are inevitable. If velocity (position) feedback is used, flow pattern control is possible. Without aforementioned flow pattern, control is very “loose” and relies on “visual” feed back by the operator. At this point, we should examine how this valv

Abstract

Black paint laser peening (bPLP) technique is currently applied for many engineering materials , especially for aluminum alloys due to high improvement in fatigue life and strength . Constant and variable   bending fatigue tests have been performed at RT and stress ratio R= -1 . The results of the present  work observed that the significance of the surface work hardening which generated high negative residual stresses in bPLP specimens .The fatigue life  improvement factor (FLIF)  for bPLP constant fatigue behavior was from 2.543 to 3.3 compared to untreated  fatigue and the increase in fatigue strength at 10⁷ cycle was 21% . The bPLP cumulative fatigue life behav

Simulation of direct current (DC) discharge plasma using
COMSOL Multiphysics software were used to study the uniformity
of deposition on anode from DC discharge sputtering using ring and
disc cathodes, then applied it experimentally to make comparison
between film thickness distribution with simulation results. Both
simulation and experimental results shows that the deposition using
copper ring cathode is more uniformity than disc cathode

Fingerprints are commonly utilized as a key technique and for personal recognition and in identification systems for personal security affairs. The most widely used fingerprint systems utilizing the distribution of minutiae points for fingerprint matching and representation. These techniques become unsuccessful when partial fingerprint images are capture, or the finger ridges suffer from lot of cuts or injuries or skin sickness. This paper suggests a fingerprint recognition technique which utilizes the local features for fingerprint representation and matching. The adopted local features have determined using Haar wavelet subbands. The system was tested experimentally using FVC2004 databases, which consists of four datasets, each set holds

Software testing is a vital part of the software development life cycle. In many cases, the system under test has more than one input making the testing efforts for every exhaustive combination impossible (i.e. the time of execution of the test case can be outrageously long). Combinatorial testing offers an alternative to exhaustive testing via considering the interaction of input values for every t-way combination between parameters. Combinatorial testing can be divided into three types which are uniform strength interaction, variable strength interaction and input-output based relation (IOR). IOR combinatorial testing only tests for the important combinations selected by the tester. Most of the researches in combinatorial testing

This research deals with the use of a number of statistical methods, such as the kernel method, watershed, histogram and cubic spline, to improve the contrast of digital images. The results obtained according to the RSME and NCC standards have proven that the spline method is the most accurate in the results compared to other statistical methods