Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a progressive airflow limitation that is preventable but not curable. It is associated with persistent symptoms that cause a considerable burden on individual productivity at work, and daily activities, and reduced quality of life, also burdening the healthcare system and society. Objectives: The study aims to measure the burden of COPD on patients in terms of daily activities and work productivity. It also seeks to investigate some inflammatory biomarkers' levels and their correlation with selected outcomes. Patients and Methods: A cross-sectional study on 120 stable COPD patients who were diagnosed and treated according to the GOLD guidelines at Kirkuk General Hospital's

This paper presents an experimental and theoretical analysis to investigate the two-phase flow boiling heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop of the refrigerant R-134a in the evaporator test section of the refrigeration system under different operating conditions. The test conditions considered are, for heat flux (13.7-36.6) kW/m², mass flux (52-105) kg/m².s, vapor quality (0.2-1) and saturation temperature (-15 to -3.7) ˚C. Experiments were carried out using a test rig for a 310W capacity refrigeration system, which is designed and constructed in the current work. Investigating of the experimental results has revealed that, the enhancement in local heat trans

This paper reports experimental and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling studies to investigate the effect of the swirl intensity on the heat transfer characteristics of conventional and swirl impingement air jets at a constant nozzle-to-plate distance ( L = 2 D). The experiments were performed using classical twisted tape inserts in a nozzle jet with three twist ratios ( y = 2.93, 3.91, and 4.89) and Reynolds numbers that varied from 4000 to 16000. The results indicate that the radial uniformity of Nusselt number (Nu) of swirl impingement air jets (SIJ) depended on the values of the swirl intensity and the air Reynolds number. The results also revealed that the SIJ that was fitted with an insert of y = 4.89, which correspo

It reflects the gross domestic product in any country total output of goods and services by the size of the country's citizens and foreign residents during the period of the year and reflect the contribution of the commodity sectors of the economy and the distribution and service in the composition of output. And gross domestic product in Iraq as an indicator dominated in the composition of oil output, along with the contribution of the service sector, as the gross domestic product is the output of a yield lien   and subjected GDP in Iraq to a series of declines succession due to vibrations of the oil market during the economic blockade on the one hand and stop imported production inputs, lack of arriving in commodity s

In the beta decay process, a neutron converts into a proton, or vice versa, so the atom in this process changes to a more stable isobar. Bethe-Weizsäcker used a quasi-experimental formula in the present study to find the most stable isobar for isobaric groups of mass nuclides (A=165-175). In a group of isobars, there are two methods of calculating the most stable isobar. The most stable isobar represents the lowest parabola value by calculating the binding energy value (B.E) for each nuclide in this family, and then drawing these binding energy values as a function of the atomic number (Z) in order to obtain the mass parabolas, the second method is by calculating the atomic number value of the most stable isobar (ZA). The results show

When the depth of stressed soil is rather small, Plate Load Test (PLT) becomes the most efficient test to estimate the soil properties for design purposes. Among these properties, modulus of subgrade reaction is the most important one that usually employed in roads and concrete pavement design. Two methods are available to perform PLT: static and dynamic methods. Static PLT is usually adopted due to its simplicity and time saving to be performs in comparison with cyclic (dynamic) method. The two methods are described in ASTM standard.

In this paper the effect of the test method used in PLT in estimation of some mechanical soil properties was distinguished via a series of both test methods applied in a same site. The comparison of