The research has designed for studying the relationship between manufacturing strategy and its flexibility under the flexible manufacturing system with their reflection on the competitive environmental performance of the firm. To interpret and tackle the problem, a hypothesis has formulated stating that “ the competitive performance of a firm is interpreted by the manufacturing strategy and flexibility which are derived from the firm and its business  strategies under the flexible manufacturing system”. Related literatures with their theoretical dissertations, which enhanced the thoughtful content, have analyzed. An illustrative case study on the flexible manufacturing system at Toyota Motors Corporation working at the g

Ovako Working Postures Analyzing System (OWAS) is a widely used method for studying awkward working postures in workplaces. This study with OWAS, analyzed working postures for manual material handling of laminations at stacking workstation for water pump assembly line in Electrical Industrial Company (EICO) / Baghdad. A computer program, WinOWAS, was used for the study. In real life workstation was found that more than 26% of the working postures observed were classified as either AC2 (slightly harmful), AC3 (distinctly harmful). Postures that needed to be corrected soon (AC3) and corresponding tasks, were identified. The most stressful tasks observed were grasping, handling, and positioning of the laminations from workers. The construct

Air pollution is one of the important problems facing Iraq. Air pollution is the result of uncontrolled emissions from factories, car exhaust electric generators, and oil refineries and often reaches unacceptable limits by international standards. These pollutants can greatly affect human health and regular population activities. For this reason, there is an urgent need for effective devices to monitor the molecular concentration of air pollutants in cities and urban areas. In this research, an optical system has been built consisting of aHelium-Neonlaser,5mWand at 632.8 nm, a glass cell with a defined size, and a power meter(Gentec-E-model: uno) where a scattering of the laser beam occurs due to air pollution. Two pollutants were examin

            In recent years, there has been expanding development in the vehicular part and the number of vehicles moving on the roads in all the sections of the country. Arabic vehicle number plate identification based on image processing is a dynamic area of this work; this technique is used for security purposes such as tracking of stolen cars and access control to restricted areas. The License Plate Recognition System (LPRS) exploits a digital camera to capture vehicle plate numbers is used as input to the proposed recognition system. Basically, the proposed system consists of three phases, vehicle license plate localization, character segmentation, and character recognition, the

The study aimed to identify the reality of the application of cost accounting system in the contracting institutions in Saudi Arabia, and the extent of the reflection of the application of this system on the effectiveness and efficiency of the general performance of these institutions. Where the research community consists of the contracting institutions operating in the Saudi Arabia, and then a suitable random sample was selected from seventy one institutions. The researchers used the historical method to track the previous studies as well as the descriptive approach to conducting the field study. The study data were analyzed by SPSS statistical program.

The results of this study conclude that there is a

The solidification process in a multi-tube latent heat energy system is affected by the natural convection and the arrangement of heat exchanger tubes, which changes the buoyancy effect as well. In the current work, the effect of the arrangement of the tubes in a multi-tube heat exchanger was examined during the solidification process with the focus on the natural convection effects inside the phase change material (PCM). The behavior of the system was numerically analyzed using liquid fraction and energy released, as well as temperature, velocity and streamline profiles for different studied cases. The arrangement of the tubes, considering seven pipes in the symmetrical condition, are assumed at different positions in the system, i

The aim of this research is controlling the amount of the robotic hand catching force using the artificial muscle wire as an actuator to achieve the desired response of the robotic hand in order to catch different things without destroying or dropping them; where the process is to be similar to that of human hand catching way. The proper selection of the amount of the catching force is achieved through out simulation using the fuzzy control technique. The mechanism of the arrangement of the muscle wires is proposed to achieve good force selections. The results indicate the feasibility of using this proposed technique which mimics human reasoning where as the weight of the caught peace increases, the force increases also with approximatel

Calculating the Inverse Kinematic (IK) equations is a complex problem due to the nonlinearity of these equations. Choosing the end effector orientation affects the reach of the target location. The Forward Kinematics (FK) of Humanoid Robotic Legs (HRL) is determined by using DenavitHartenberg (DH) method. The HRL has two legs with five Degrees of Freedom (DoF) each. The paper proposes using a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to optimize the best orientation angle of the end effector of HRL. The selected orientation angle is used to solve the IK equations to reach the target location with minimum error. The performance of the proposed method is measured by six scenarios with different simulated positions of the legs. The proposed

This work describes the enhancement of phenol red decolorization through immobilizing of laccase in chitosan and enzyme recycling. Commercial laccase from white rot fungus, Trametesversicolor (Tvlac), was immobilizedin to freshly prepared chitosan beads by using glutaraldehyde as a cross linker. Characterization of prepared chitosan was confirmed by FTIR and scanning electron microscope (SEM). Tvlac (46.2 U/mL) immobilized into chitosan beads at 0.8 % glutaraldehyde (v/v) within 24 hrs. Synthetic (HBT) and natural (vanillin) mediators were used to enhance dye decolorizoation. It was found that 89 % of phenol red was decolorized by chitosan beads within 180 min. in the absence of enzyme and mediator, while decolorization percenta