The purpose of this study is to avoid delays and cost changes that occur in emergency reconstruction projects especially in post disaster circumstances. This study is aimed to identify the factors that affect the real construction period and the real cost of a project against the estimated period of construction and the estimated cost of the project. The case study is related to the construction projects in Iraq. Thirty projects in different areas of construction in Iraq were selected as a sample for this study. Project participants from the projects authorities provided data about the projects through a data collection distributed survey made by the authors. Mathematical data analysis was used to construct a model to predict change in time and cost of the projects before the start of the construction. The artificial neural networks analysis was selected as a mathematical approach. The most important factors identified leading to schedule delays and cost increase were contractor failure, redesigning of designs/plans and change orders, security issues, selection of low-price bids, weather factors, and owner failures. The use of the ANN model for such a problem is expected to be an effective method for modeling this complicated phenomenon.
Urinary stones are one of the most common painful disorders of the urinary system. Four new technologies have transformed the treatment of urinary stones: Electrohydraulic lithotripsy, ultrasonic lithotripsy, extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy, and laser lithotripsy.The purpose of this study is to determine whether pulsed holmium laser energy is an effective method for fragmenting urinary tract stones in vitro, and to determine whether stone composition affects the efficacy of holmium laser lithotripsy. Human urinary stones of known composition with different sizes, shapes and colors were used for this study. The weight and the size of each stone were measured. The surgical laser system which used in our study is Ho:YAG laser(2100nm)
... Show MoreThe main challenge is to protect the environment from future deterioration due to pollution and the lack of natural resources. Therefore, one of the most important things to pay attention to and get rid of its negative impact is solid waste. Solid waste is a double-edged sword according to the way it is dealt with, as neglecting it causes a serious environmental risk from water, air and soil pollution, while dealing with it in the right way makes it an important resource in preserving the environment. Accordingly, the proper management of solid waste and its reuse or recycling is the most important factor. Therefore, attention has been drawn to the use of solid waste in different ways, and the most common way is to use it as an alternative
... Show MoreThe city of Samawah is one of the most important cities which emerged in the poverty area within the poverty map produced by the Ministry of Planning, despite being an important provincial centre. Although it has great development potentials, it was neglected for more than 50 years,. This dereliction has caused a series of negative accumulations at the urban levels (environmental, social and economic). Therefore, the basic idea of this research is to detect part of these challenges that are preventing growth and development of the city. The methodology of the research is to extrapolate the reality with the analysis of the results, data and environmental impact assessment of the projec
The main objective of this work was to adopt an environmentally friendly technology with enhanced results. The technology of magnetic water (MW) treatment system can be used in concrete mixture production instead of potable water (PW) to improve both workability and strength. Two types of concrete were adopted: normal concreter production with two grades 25 and 35 MPa and the self-compacted concrete (SCC) with 35 MPa grade. The concrete mixes containing MW instead of PW results showed that, for 25 MPa grade, an improvement in a compressive strength of 15.1, 14.8, and 10.2% was achieved for 7, 28, and 90 days, respectively. For 35 MPa grade, an improvement of 13.6, 11.5, and
Community detection is an important and interesting topic for better understanding and analyzing complex network structures. Detecting hidden partitions in complex networks is proven to be an NP-hard problem that may not be accurately resolved using traditional methods. So it is solved using evolutionary computation methods and modeled in the literature as an optimization problem. In recent years, many researchers have directed their research efforts toward addressing the problem of community structure detection by developing different algorithms and making use of single-objective optimization methods. In this study, we have continued that research line by improving the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm using a
... Show MoreThe aim of this study was to investigate antibiotic amoxicillin removal from synthetic pharmaceutical wastewater. Titanium dioxide (TiO2) was used in photocatalysis treatment method under natural solar irradiation in a tubular reactor. The photocatalytic removal efficiency was evaluated by the reduction in amoxicillin concentration. The effects of antibiotics concentration, TiO2 dose, irradiation time and the effect of pH were studied. The optimum conditions were found to be irradiation time 5 hr, catalyst dosage 0.6 g/L, flow rate 1 L/min and pH 5. The photocatalytic treatment was able to destruct the amoxicillin in 5 hr and induced an amoxicillin reduction of about 10% with 141.8 kJ/L accumulate
... Show MoreProjects suspensions are between the most insistent tasks confronted by the construction field accredited to the sector’s difficulty and its essential delay risk foundations’ interdependence. Machine learning provides a perfect group of techniques, which can attack those complex systems. The study aimed to recognize and progress a wellorganized predictive data tool to examine and learn from delay sources depend on preceding data of construction projects by using decision trees and naïve Bayesian classification algorithms. An intensive review of available data has been conducted to explore the real reasons and causes of construction project delays. The results show that the postpo
The main purpose of this paper is to introduce and prove some fixed point theorems for two maps that
satisfy -contractive conditions with rational expression in partially ordered metric spaces, our results improve and unify a multitude of fixed point theorems and generalize some recent results in ordered partially metric space.
Many purposes require communicating audio files between the users using different applications of social media. The security level of these applications is limited; at the same time many audio files are secured and must be accessed by authorized persons only, while, most present works attempt to hide single audio file in certain cover media. In this paper, a new approach of hiding three audio signals with unequal sizes in single color digital image has been proposed using the frequencies transform of this image. In the proposed approach, the Fast Fourier Transform was adopted where each audio signal is embedded in specific region with high frequencies in the frequency spectrum of the cover image to sa
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