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

In modern hydraulic control systems, the trend in hydraulic power applications is to improve efficiency and performance. “Proportional valve” is generally applied to pressure, flow and directional-control valves which continuously convert a variable input signal into a smooth and proportional hydraulic output signal. It creates a variable resistance (orifice) upstream and downstream of a hydraulic actuator, and is meter in/meter out circuit and hence pressure drop, and power losses are inevitable. If velocity (position) feedback is used, flow pattern control is possible. Without aforementioned flow pattern, control is very “loose” and relies on “visual” feed back by the operator. At this point, we should examine how this valv

The temperature control process of electric heating furnace (EHF) systems is a quite difficult and changeable task owing to non-linearity, time delay, time-varying parameters, and the harsh environment of the furnace. In this paper, a robust temperature control scheme for an EHF system is developed using an adaptive active disturbance rejection control (AADRC) technique with a continuous sliding-mode based component. First, a comprehensive dynamic model is established by using convection laws, in which the EHF systems can be characterized as an uncertain second order system. Second, an adaptive extended state observer (AESO) is utilized to estimate the states of the EHF system and total disturbances, in which the observer gains are updated

Bending effects on the transmission of optical signal are investigated on a single mode
optical fiber (SMOF) of 10 m length, core radius of 5 μm and optical refractive index difference
0.003. The bending radii (R) were between 0.08 and 0.0015 m. A great decrease in the amplitude is
shown for radii below 0.01 m. Sudden break down occurs for radii less than 0.0015 m. Birefringence
(B) is difficult to measure for long fibers. Meanwhile, B was found by comparing with calibrated
fiber of the same properties but of length of 0.075 m. The results show an increase in propagation
constant (Δβ) and the decrease in beat length (Lb), and show that bending decreases the critical radius
of curvature (Rc) related to B. The chang

Abstract 

This paper presents mechanical and electrical design, and implementation  process of industrial robot, 3-DoF type SCARA (selective compliment assembly robot arm),with two rotations and one translation used for welding applications.The design process also included the controller design which was based on PLC(programmable logic controller) as well as selection of mechanical and electrical components.The challenge was to use the available components in Iraq with reasonable costs. The robot mentioned is fully automated using programmable logic controller PLC(Zelio type SR3-B261BD),with 16inputs and 10 outputs. The PLC was implemented in FBD logic to obtain three different automatic motions with hi

Abstract. In this paper, a high order extended state observer (HOESO) based a sliding mode control (SMC) is proposed for a flexible joint robot (FJR) system in the presence of time varying external disturbance. A composite controller is integrated the merits of both HOESO and SMC to enhance the tracking performance of FJR system under the time varying and fast lumped disturbance. First, the HOESO estimator is constructed based on only one measured state to precisely estimate unknown system states and lumped disturbance with its high order derivatives in the FJR system. Second, the SMC scheme is designed based on such accurate estimations to govern the nominal FJR system by well compensating the estimation errors in the states and the lumped

 A particle swarm optimization algorithm and neural network like self-tuning PID controller for CSTR system is presented. The scheme of the discrete-time PID control structure is based on neural network and tuned the parameters of the PID controller by using a particle swarm optimization PSO technique as a simple and fast training algorithm. The proposed method has advantage that it is not necessary to use a combined structure of identification and decision because it used PSO. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive PID neural control algorithm in terms of minimum tracking error and smoothness control signal obtained for non-linear dynamical CSTR system.

Protection of the oil pipelineswhich extracted from the wells was found to shut the well and prevent the leakage of oil when broken using safety valve. This valve is automatically activated by loss of pressure between the well and pipelines, which take the pressure, signal from hydraulic pressure sensor through pressure control valve which has constant or variable value but it is regulated manually. The manual regulatory process requires the presence of monitoring workers continuously near the wells which are always found in remote areas. In this paper, a smart system has been proposed that work with proportional pressure control valve and also electronic pressure sensor through Arduino controller, which is programmed in a way that satisfie

The main part in hydraulic system is directional control valve. Directional control valve has complex construction such as moving spool to control the direction of actuator for required speed. Magneto-rheological (MR) fluid is one of controllable fluids. Utilizing the MR fluid properties, direct interface can be realized between magnetic field and fluid power without the need for moving parts like spool in directional control valves. This study proposes the design of four ways/three position MR proportional directional control valve (4/3 MR valve). The construction of valve and the principle of work are presented. Analysis for magnetic circuit and simulation for valve performance were done. The experiment was conducted to show the principle

In this paper the variable structure control theory is utilized to derive a discontinuous controller to the magnetic levitation system. The magnetic levitation system model is considered uncertain, which subjected to the uncertainty in system parameters, also it is open-loop unstable and strongly nonlinear. The proposed variable structure control to magnetic levitation system is proved, and the area of attraction is determined. Additionally, the chattering, which induced due to the discontinuity in control law, is attenuated by using a non-smooth approximate. With this approximation the resulted controller is a continuous variable structure controller with a determined steady state error according to the selected control