The consumption of fresh fruits has increased nowadays due to the lifestyle of the consumers. Maintaining the quality and nutritional value of cut fruits during storage is difficult compared to whole fruits. Deterioration of internal and external quality usually occurs in freshly harvested fruits. It is necessary to use different techniques to maintain the quality and increase the shelf life of the freshly cut product. This research studied the effect of treating apple slices with cold plasma once and with filtered water again on quality characteristics (hardness, moisture content, sugar content, carbohydrate content, and color) after being stored for five days. The best treatment was determined using two different pressures of the plasma j

The paper deals with claims in construction projects in Iraq and studies their types, causes, impacts, resolution methods and then proposes a management system to control the impacts of claims. Two parts have been done to achieve the research objective (theoretical part and practical part). The findings showed that the main types of the claims are extra work claims, different site condition claims, delay claims and the main causes of the claims are variation of the orders, design errors and omission, delay in payments by owner, variation in quantities and scheduling errors. The claims have bad impacts on the cost by increasing (10% to 25%) and also on the duration of the project by increasing from (25% to 50%).The negotiation is the main

......

The Iraqi government seeks to overcome the financial crisis by investing and privatizing some projects to achieve sustainable growth. Most of the investment projects in Iraq suffer from many constraints that greatly impact the success of these projects. A survey of the opinions of a group of experts was conducted to identify the most important constraints facing the investment process in Iraq. Then the experts' answers were arranged in a closed questionnaire and distributed to the research sample for which the statistical analysis was conducted. Through it, the most important (17) factors that had the greatest impact on the failure of investment projects in Iraq were reached. One of the main constraints was

Although renewable energy systems have become an interesting global issue, it is not continuous either daily or seasonally. Latent heat energy storage (LHES) is one of the suitable solutions for this problem. LHES becomes a basic element in renewable energy systems. LHES compensate for the energy lack when these systems are at low production conditions. The present work considered a shell and tube LHES for numerical investigation of the tube rotation influence on the melting process. The simulation and calculations were carried out using ANSYS Fluent software. Paraffin wax represents the phase change material (PCM) in this work, while water was selected to be the heat transfer fluid (HTF). The calculations were carried o

Background: Antibacterial action of root canal filling is an important factor for successful root canal treatment, so the aim of the study was to identify and to compare the antimicrobial effect of new sealer (GuttaFlow) to commonly used endodontic sealers (AH Plus, Apexit and EndoFill) against four endodontic microbes. Materials and methods: Twenty patients aged (30-40) years with infected root canals were selected. Four types of microorganisms were isolated from root canals (E faecalis, Staphylococcus aureus, E coli and Candida albicans) and cultured on Mueller Hinton agar Petri-dishes. After identification and isolation of bacterial species, agar diffusion method was used to assess the antibacterial action of four contemporary endodontic

Introduction: Carrier-based gutta-percha is an effective method of root canal obturation creating a 3-dimensional filling; however, retrieval of the plastic carrier is relatively difficult, particularly with smaller sizes. The purpose of this study was to develop composite carriers consisting of polyethylene (PE), hydroxyapatite (HA), and strontium oxide (SrO) for carrier-based root canal obturation. Methods: Composite fibers of HA, PE, and SrO were fabricated in the shape of a carrier for delivering gutta-percha (GP) using a melt-extrusion process. The fibers were characterized using infrared spectroscopy and the thermal properties determined using differential scanning calorimetry. The elastic modulus and tensile strength tests were dete

This paper is submitted as anew approach to simulate manufacturing control & planning system to define the problem of designing control system on the needs for materials.

Production planning & control is a total and complex operation, resides in the essence of manufacturing companies operations. The successful process of production planning and control systems is critical for the staying of manufacturing organizations in markets leading to the increasing consumer competition and which dominate most of manufacturing sectors because of the market oriented economy , thus , what has happened previously , that the companies possessed a great inventory of crude material, components, and groupings and they use in flexible techni

Trickle irrigation is a system for supplying filtered water and fertilizer directly into the soil and water and it is allowed to dissipate under low pressure in an exact predetermined pattern. An equation to estimate the wetted area of unsaturated soil with water uptake by roots is simulated numerically using the HYDRUS-2D/3D software. In this paper, two soil types, which were different in saturated hydraulic conductivity were used with two types of crops tomato and corn, different values of emitter discharge and initial volumetric soil moisture content were assumed. It was assumed that the water uptake by roots was presented as a continuous sink function and it was introduced into Richard's equation in the unsaturated z

A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a computerized database management system for accumulating, storage, retrieval, analysis, and display spatial data. In general, GIS contains two broad categories of information, geo-referenced spatial data and attribute data. Geo-referenced spatial data define objects that have an orientation and relationship in two or three-dimensional space, while attribute data is qualitative data that can be counted for recording and analysis. The main aim of this research is to reveal the role of GIS technology in the enhancement of bridge maintenance management system components such as the output results, and make it more interpretable through dynamic colour coding and more sophisticated vi

Nonlinear differential equation stability is a very important feature of applied mathematics, as it has a wide variety of applications in both practical and physical life problems. The major object of the manuscript is to discuss and apply several techniques using modify the Krasovskii's method and the modify variable gradient method which are used to check the stability for some kinds of linear or nonlinear differential equations. Lyapunov function is constructed using the variable gradient method and Krasovskii’s method to estimate the stability of nonlinear systems. If the function of Lyapunov is positive, it implies that the nonlinear system is asymptotically stable. For the nonlinear systems, stability is still difficult even though