The road network in the Baranan mountain, near Dararash village, connecting Sulaymaniyah city with Qaradagh town, plays a major role in socio- economic activities of Qaradagh town and its surrounding villages. Any type of slope failure in the area may cause breaking up in traffic, loss of lives, and injuries.

      For assessing the stability of rock slopes in the area, seven stations (rock-cut slopes) were selected along the road and evaluated by kinematic analysis, using DIPS v6.008 software and slope mass rating system (SMRTool - v205 software).

      The kinematic analysis revealed that planar and wedge sliding may occur in stations no.2, 5, 6, and 7, flexural toppling

The disposal of textile effluents to the surface water bodies represents the critical issue especially these effluents can have negative impacts on such bodies due to the presence of dyes in their composition. Biological remediation methods like constructed wetlands are more cost-effective and environmental friendly technique in comparison with traditional methods. The ability of vertical subsurface flow constructed wetlands units for treating of simulated wastewater polluted with Congo red dye has been studied in this work. The units were packed with waterworks sludge bed that either be unplanted or planted with Phragmites australis and Typha domingensis. The efficacy of present units was evaluated by monitoring of DO, Temperature, COD

The temperature control process of electric heating furnace (EHF) systems is a quite difficult and changeable task owing to non-linearity, time delay, time-varying parameters, and the harsh environment of the furnace. In this paper, a robust temperature control scheme for an EHF system is developed using an adaptive active disturbance rejection control (AADRC) technique with a continuous sliding-mode based component. First, a comprehensive dynamic model is established by using convection laws, in which the EHF systems can be characterized as an uncertain second order system. Second, an adaptive extended state observer (AESO) is utilized to estimate the states of the EHF system and total disturbances, in which the observer gains are updated

Bearing capacity of soil is an important factor in designing shallow foundations. It is directly related to foundation dimensions and consequently its performance. The calculations for obtaining the bearing capacity of a soil needs many varying parameters, for example soil type, depth of foundation, unit weight of soil, etc. which makes these calculation very variable–parameter dependent. This paper presents the results of comparison between the theoretical equation stated by Terzaghi and the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) technique to estimate the ultimate bearing capacity of the strip shallow footing on sandy soils. The results show a very good agreement between the theoretical solution and the ANN technique. Results revealed that us

The esterification of oleic acid with 2-ethylhexanol in presence of sulfuric acid  as homogeneous catalyst was investigated in this work to produce 2-ethylhexyl oleate (biodiesel) by using semi batch reactive distillation. The effect of reaction temperature (100 to 130°C), 2-ethylhexanol:oleic acid molar ratio (1:1 to 1:3) and catalysts concentration (0.2 to 1wt%) were studied. Higher conversion of 97% was achieved with operating conditions of reaction temperature of 130°C, molar ratio of free fatty acid to alcohol of 1:2 and catalyst concentration of 1wt%. A simulation was adopted from basic principles of the reactive distillation using MATLAB to describe the process. Good agreement was achieved.