Abstract Aim: Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder which affects communication and social interaction of children. It is a heterogeneous disease with various clinical presentations. Some genes are involved in its pathogenesis. It has been suggested that environmental exposure to lead can increase the risk of autism. The aim of our study was to compare blood lead levels among autistic and non-autistic children. Material and Method: This retrospective study included 107 children (60 with autism and 47 without autism) referred from the different Iraqi provinces, in the years 2015, 2016 and 2017, to the poisoning consultation center in Baghdad. Data collection including age, gender, residence, referral source, family history and blood lead l

Worldwide, hundreds of millions of people have been infected with COVID-19 since December 2019; however, about 20% or less developed severe symptoms. The main aim of the current study was to  assess  the  relationship  between  the  severity of Covid-19 and different clinical and laboratory parameters. A total number of 466 Arabs have willingly joined this prospective cohort. Out of the total number, 297 subjects (63.7%) had negative COVID-19 tests, and thus, they were recruited as controls, while 169 subjects (36.3%) who tested positive for COVID-19 were enrolled as cases. Out of the total number of COVID-19 patients, 127 (75.15%) presented with mild symptoms, and 42 (24.85%) had severe symptoms. The age range for the partic

The objective of this study is to apply Artificial Neural Network for heat transfer analysis of shell-and-tube heat exchangers widely used in power plants and refineries. Practical data was obtained by using industrial heat exchanger operating in power generation department of Dura refinery. The commonly used Back Propagation (BP) algorithm was used to train and test networks by divided the data to three samples (training, validation and testing data) to give more approach data with actual case. Inputs of the neural network include inlet water temperature, inlet air temperature and mass flow rate of air. Two outputs (exit water temperature to cooling tower and exit air temperature to second stage of air compressor) were taken in ANN.

In this paper, the Monte-Carlo simulation method was used to compare the robust circular S estimator with the circular Least squares method in the case of no outlier data and in the case of the presence of an outlier in the data through two trends, the first is contaminant with high inflection points that represents contaminant in the circular independent variable, and the second the contaminant in the vertical variable that represents the circular dependent variable using three comparison criteria, the median standard error (Median SE), the median of the mean squares of error (Median MSE), and the median of the mean cosines of the circular residuals (Median A(k)). It was concluded that the method of least squares is better than the

The heat and mass transfer coefficients of the indirect contact closed circuit cooling tower, ICCCCT, were investigated experimentally. Different experiments were conducted involving the controlling parameters such as air velocity, spray water to air mass flow rate ratio, spray water flow rate, ambient air wet bulb temperature and the provided heat load to investigate their effects on the performance of the ICCCCT. Also the effect of using packing on the performance of the ICCCCT was investigated. It was noticed that these parameters affect the tower performance and the use of packing materials is a good approach to enhance the performance for different operational conditions. Correlations for mass and heat transfer coefficients are pres

The earth-air heat exchanger (EHX) has a promising potential to passively save the energy consumption of traditional air conditioning systems while maintaining a high degree of indoor comfort. The use of EHX systems for air conditioning in commercial and industrial settings offers several environmental benefits and is capable of operating in both standalone and hybrid modes. This study tests the performance and effectiveness of an EHX design in a sandy soil area in Baghdad, Iraq. The area has a climate of the subtropical semi-humid type. Ambient air temperatures and soil temperatures were recorded throughout the months of 2021. During the months of January and June, the temperatures of the inlet and outflow air at varying air veloci

This paper presents an experimental and theoretical analysis to investigate the two-phase flow boiling heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop of the refrigerant R-134a in the evaporator test section of the refrigeration system under different operating conditions. The test conditions considered are, for heat flux (13.7-36.6) kW/m², mass flux (52-105) kg/m².s, vapor quality (0.2-1) and saturation temperature (-15 to -3.7) ˚C. Experiments were carried out using a test rig for a 310W capacity refrigeration system, which is designed and constructed in the current work. Investigating of the experimental results has revealed that, the enhancement in local heat trans