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 objective of the current research is to identify the degree of awareness of the teachers of Arabic language with the requirements of sustainable development. The research sample consisted of (100) male and female teachers of the Arabic language. A 3-likert scale of (71) items grouped into practical and cognitive aspects, five trends for each aspect was designed by the researcher to explore the required data. The results showed that the level of awareness of teachers of the Arabic language was moderate of both the cognitive and practical aspects of sustainable education with means (1.69) and (1.48) respectively. The researcher presented a set of recommendations and suggestions.
A high percentage of existing buildings in Iraq are traditional buildings, yet there is approximately no such green building in Baghdad or other governorates. Most of these buildings require urgent upgrading to increase their performance (operationally, economically, and environmentally), also the building owners looking for identifying and implementing many of the green building measures to reduce the operational and maintenance costs of their buildings. The decision-makers need to support the possibility of achieving sustainable measures of existing building rating systems such as LEED or BREEAM, and that would require an optimization model. The goal of this study is to maximize the
Villages in most rural areas of the developing world, including Iraq, suffer from a deterioration in the urban structure in its various aspects, both in the lack of internal planning in terms of residential unit design which is not commensurate with the sustainable health life, in addition to the lack of infrastructure and community services networks As well as road networks linking them to neighboring urban centers, which was accompanied by the emergence of other problems, including the desire of the population to migrate to neighboring cities and the deterioration of economic activities due to lack of activation of economic development plans (Rural villages suffer from a lack of interest in urban development within the regional spatial
... Show MoreSmear zone is usually formed around the prefabricated vertical drains (PVD’s) due to mandrel driving. The geotechnical properties of the soil in this zone exhibit significant changes that affect the performance of the PVD’s. The most relevant property in this respect is the coefficient of permeability. So far, no serious attention is paid to investigate the effects of shearing under large shear strains on the geotechnical properties of the soft soil in Fao region. In this study, an extensive laboratory testing program was conducted to assess the characteristics of the smear zone with an emphasis on the permeability coefficient of Fao soft soil. The results show that the permeability of the smear zone is about 70% of
... Show MoreSingle-photon detection concept is the most crucial factor that determines the performance of quantum key distribution (QKD) systems. In this paper, a simulator with time domain visualizers and configurable parameters using continuous time simulation approach is presented for modeling and investigating the performance of single-photon detectors operating in Gieger mode at the wavelength of 830 nm. The widely used C30921S silicon avalanche photodiode was modeled in terms of avalanche pulse, the effect of experiment conditions such as excess voltage, temperature and average photon number on the photon detection efficiency, dark count rate and afterpulse probability. This work shows a general repeatable modeling process for significant perform
... Show MoreMassive multiple-input multiple-output (MaMi) systems have attracted much research attention during the last few years. This is because MaMi systems are able to achieve a remarkable improvement in data rate and thus meet the immensely ongoing traffic demands required by the future wireless networks. To date, the downlink training sequence (DTS) for the frequency division duplex (FDD) MaMi communications systems have been designed based on the idealistic assumption of white noise environments. However, it is essential and more practical to consider the colored noise environments when designing an efficient DTS for channel estimation. To this end, this paper proposes a new DTS design by exploring the joint use of spatial channel and n
... Show MoreThis research describes a new model inspired by Mobilenetv2 that was trained on a very diverse dataset. The goal is to enable fire detection in open areas to replace physical sensor-based fire detectors and reduce false alarms of fires, to achieve the lowest losses in open areas via deep learning. A diverse fire dataset was created that combines images and videos from several sources. In addition, another self-made data set was taken from the farms of the holy shrine of Al-Hussainiya in the city of Karbala. After that, the model was trained with the collected dataset. The test accuracy of the fire dataset that was trained with the new model reached 98.87%.
This paper discusses using H2 and H∞ robust control approaches for designing control systems. These approaches are applied to elementary control system designs, and their respective implementation and pros and cons are introduced. The H∞ control synthesis mainly enforces closed-loop stability, covering some physical constraints and limitations. While noise rejection and disturbance attenuation are more naturally expressed in performance optimization, which can represent the H2 control synthesis problem. The paper also applies these two methodologies to multi-plant systems to study the stability and performance of the designed controllers. Simulation results show that the H2 controller tracks a desirable cl
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