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.
In this study, a traumatic spinal cord injury (TSCI) classification system is proposed using a convolutional neural network (CNN) technique with automatically learned features from electromyography (EMG) signals for a non-human primate (NHP) model. A comparison between the proposed classification system and a classical classification method (k-nearest neighbors, kNN) is also presented. Developing such an NHP model with a suitable assessment tool (i.e., classifier) is a crucial step in detecting the effect of TSCI using EMG, which is expected to be essential in the evaluation of the efficacy of new TSCI treatments. Intramuscular EMG data were collected from an agonist/antagonist tail muscle pair for the pre- and post-spinal cord lesi
... Show MoreHospitals are part of the service organizations and most importantly at the level of individuals because they are tied to the people health and their daily lives , the nursing service is one of the important services provided by hospitals, and nurses are the human resource that offers this service, from this standpoint the idea of research came to prepare work Scheduling for nurses in a scientific way to improve performance operational for their services and provide efficient service available 24 hours a day, the research use one of the modern and scientific rules of scheduling its “schedule of
... Show MoreA reliable and environmental analytical method was developed for the direct determination of tetracycline using flow injection analysis (FIA) and batch procedures with spectrophotometric detection. The developed method is based on the reaction between a chromogenic reagent (vanadium (III) solution) and tetracycline at room temperature and in a neutral medium, resulting in the formation of an intense brown product that shows maximum absorption at 395 nm. The analytical conditions were improved by the application of experimental design. The proposed method was successfully used to analyze samples of commercial medications and verified throughout the concentration ranges of 25–250 and 3–25 µg/mL for both FIA and batch procedures, respecti
... Show MoreFatty Acid Methyl Ester (FAME) produced from biomass offers several advantages such as renewability and sustainability. The typical production process of FAME is accompanied by various impurities such as alcohol, soap, glycerol, and the spent catalyst. Therefore, the most challenging part of the FAME production is the purification process. In this work, a novel application of bulk liquid membrane (BLM) developed from conventional solvent extraction methods was investigated for the removal of glycerol from FAME. The extraction and stripping processes are combined into a single system, allowing for simultaneous solvent recovery whereby low-cost quaternary ammonium salt-glycerol-based deep eutectic solvent (DES) is used as the membrane phase.
... Show MoreThe monogenean Gyrodactylus bychowskianus Bogolepova, 1950 is recorded in the present study for the first time in Iraq from the gills of the cyprinid fish Arabibarbus grypus (Heckel, 1843); which was collected from the Tigris River at Al-Taji Beach north of Baghdad Province during the period from July until November 2018.
Lead-free 0.88(Na0.5Bi0.5)TiO3–0.084(K0.5Bi0.5)TiO3–0.036BaTiO3 (BNT–BKT–BT) piezoelectric ceramics were prepared using the conventional mixed-oxide method with a sintering temperature range of 1120–1200 °C. The effect of the sintering temperature on the crystal structure, microstructure, and densification, as well as the dielectrics, piezoelectrics, and the pyroelectric properties of BNT–BKT–BT ceramics were investigated. Scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction were used to study the microstructures of the sintered samples. The results showed that the increase in sintering temperature was very effective in improving both the density and electrical properties. However, the samples deteriorated when the sintering te
... Show More