Globally, Sustainability is very quickly becoming a fundamental requirement of the construction industry as it delivers its projects; whether buildings or infrastructures. Throughout more than two decades, many modeling schemes, evaluation tools, and rating systems have been introduced en route to realizing sustainable construction. Many of these, however, lack consensus on evaluation criteria, a robust scientific model that captures the logic behind their sustainability performance evaluation, and therefore experience discrepancies between rated results and actual performance. Moreover, very few of the evaluation tools available satisfactorily address infrastructure projects. The research introduces a system engineering model that abstracts the environment, the construction product, and its production system as three interacting systems that exchange materials, energy, and information. The model utilizes this setup to capture and quantify essential flows exchanged between such three systems, to evaluate sustainability. The research walks through the development of a generic case of the model, and then demonstrates its utility in evaluating the sustainability performance of civil infrastructure projects. The developed model will address an identified gap within the current body of knowledge by considering infrastructure projects. Through the ability to simulate different scenarios, the model will enable identifying which activities, products, and processes impact the environment more, and hence potential areas for optimization and improvement.
The process of controlling a Flexible Joint Robot Manipulator (FJRM) requires additional sensors for measuring the state variables of flexible joints. Therefore, taking the elasticity into account adds a lot of complexity as all the additional sensors must be taken into account during the control process. This paper proposes a nonlinear observer that controls FJRM, without requiring equipment sensors for measuring the states. The nonlinear state equations are derived in detail for the FJRM where nonlinearity, of order three, is considered. The Takagi–Sugeno Fuzzy Model (T-SFM) technique is applied to linearize the FJRM system. The Luenberger observer is designed to estimate the unmeasured states using error correction. The develop
... Show MoreThis research aims to test the ability of glass waste powder to adsorb cadmium from aqueous solutions. The glass wastes were collected from the Glass Manufacturing Factory in Ramadi. The effect of concentration and reaction time on sorption was tested through a series of laboratory experiments. Four Cd concentrations (20, 40, 60, and 80) as each concentration was tested ten times for 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, and 50 min. Solid (glass wastes) to liquid was 2g to 30ml was fixed in each experiment where the total volume of the solution was 30ml. The pH, total dissolved salts and electrical conductivity were measured at 30ºC. The equilibrium concentration was determined at 25 minutes, thereafter it was noted that the sorption
... Show MoreSegmentation of urban features is considered a major research challenge in the fields of photogrammetry and remote sensing. However, the dense datasets now readily available through airborne laser scanning (ALS) offer increased potential for 3D object segmentation. Such potential is further augmented by the availability of full-waveform (FWF) ALS data. FWF ALS has demonstrated enhanced performance in segmentation and classification through the additional physical observables which can be provided alongside standard geometric information. However, use of FWF information is not recommended without prior radiometric calibration, taking into account all parameters affecting the backscatter energy. This paper reports the implementation o
... Show MoreThe operating characteristics of optoelectronic devices depend critically on the properties physical of the constituent materials, interesting compound has been focused on this research formed from group III and V of the periodic table. Thin film n-InSb heterjuntion were successfully fabricated on p-Si substrates by thermal evaporation technique at different annealing temperature (as prepared, 400,500,600) °C. The effect of annealing temperature on the structural, surface morphology, optical and optoelectronic properties of InSb films were investigated and studied. The crystal structure of the film was characterized by X-ray diffraction and techniques. AFM techniques inspect the surface morphology of InSb films, the study presented the val
... Show MoreIn this paper Volterra Runge-Kutta methods which include: method of order two and four will be applied to general nonlinear Volterra integral equations of the second kind. Moreover we study the convergent of the algorithms of Volterra Runge-Kutta methods. Finally, programs for each method are written in MATLAB language and a comparison between the two types has been made depending on the least square errors.
* Khalifa E. Sharquie1, Hayder Al-Hamamy2, Adil A. Noaimi1, Mohammed A. Al-Marsomy3, Husam Ali Salman4, American Journal of Dermatology and Venereology, 2014 - Cited by 2