Abstract. This study presents experimental and numerical investigation on the effectiveness of electrode geometry on flushing and debris removal in Electrical Discharge Drilling (EDD) process. A new electrode geometry, namely side-cut electrode, was designed and manufactured based on circular electrode geometry. Several drilling operations were performed on stainless steel 304 using rotary tubular electrodes with circular and side-cut geometries. Drilling performance was characterized by Material Removal Rate (MRR), Electrode Wear Rate (EWR), and Tool Wear Ratio (TWR). Dimensional features and surface quality of drilled holes were evaluated based on Overcut (OC), Hole Depth (HD), and Surface Roughness (SR). Three-dimensional

The purpose of this article was to identify and assess the importance of risk factors in the tendering phase of construction projects. The construction project cannot succeed without the identification and categorization of these risk elements. In this article, a questionnaire for likelihood and impact was designed and distributed to a panel of specialists to analyze risk factors. The risk matrix was also used to research, explore, and identify the risks that influence the tendering phase of construction projects. The probability and impact values assigned to risk are used to calculate the risk's score. A risk matrix is created by combining probability and impact criteria. To determine the main risk elements for the tend

The purpose of this article was to identify and assess the importance of risk factors in the tendering phase of construction projects. The construction project cannot succeed without the identification and categorization of these risk elements. In this article, a questionnaire for likelihood and impact was designed and distributed to a panel of specialists to analyze risk factors. The risk matrix was also used to research, explore, and identify the risks that influence the tendering phase of construction projects. The probability and impact values assigned to risk are used to calculate the risk's score. A risk matrix is created by combining probability and impact criteria. To determine the main risk elements for the tender phase of

In this study, we have created a new Arabic dataset annotated according to Ekman’s basic emotions (Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Sadness and Surprise). This dataset is composed from Facebook posts written in the Iraqi dialect. We evaluated the quality of this dataset using four external judges which resulted in an average inter-annotation agreement of 0.751. Then we explored six different supervised machine learning methods to test the new dataset. We used Weka standard classifiers ZeroR, J48, Naïve Bayes, Multinomial Naïve Bayes for Text, and SMO. We also used a further compression-based classifier called PPM not included in Weka. Our study reveals that the PPM classifier significantly outperforms other classifiers such as SVM and N

We aimed to examine the effect of amoxicillin and azithromycin suspensions on the microhardness of sliver-reinforced glass ionomer and nano-resin modified glass ionomer (GI). Method: Thirty discs (2mm height x 4mm diameter) of each type of GI were prepared, which were randomly assigned to amoxicillin, azithromycin, and artificial saliva groups. Microhardness was evaluated by Vickers hardness test before and after three immersion cycles. Results: The overall model (P < 0.001), before/after intervention (P < 0.001), intervention group (type of antibiotic) (P=0.013), and type of glass ionomer (P < 0.001) showed significant differences among study groups (P < 0.001). Post hoc test showed only non-significant before/after difference for Azithrom

Zernike Moments has been popularly used in many shape-based image retrieval studies due to its powerful shape representation. However its strength and weaknesses have not been clearly highlighted in the previous studies. Thus, its powerful shape representation could not be fully utilized. In this paper, a method to fully capture the shape representation properties of Zernike Moments is implemented and tested on a single object for binary and grey level images. The proposed method works by determining the boundary of the shape object and then resizing the object shape to the boundary of the image. Three case studies were made. Case 1 is the Zernike Moments implementation on the original shape object image. In Case 2, the centroid of the s

A new laboratory study conducted on stepped spillways in order to investigate their efficiency of dissipating flow energy. All previous study on stepped spillway indicated that the flow energy dissipation decreased as increasing in discharge. Increasing in the step numbers and the spillway slope led to energy dissipation decrease. In this study, an experimental attempt to increase energy dissipation at variable discharges was performed on stepped spillway and that leads to decreasing the cost of initiating the stilling basin or may be ignoring it. Five spillways were constructed from concrete and tested to investigate and compare among them. Three were roughed by gravel with different size for each one, one of them was s