The most universal and basic damages caused by an earthquakes are buildings damage and human casualties. A simplified method, the RADIUS 99 Tool is used to calculate seismic intensity (shaking) distribution, buildings damage, number of casualties and lifelines damage, due to assumed earthquake scenario. In this study, Al - Kadhmiya sector in Baghdad city was chosen for assessing seismic risk, for this purpose, this area was divided into mesh of 1*1 km2 cell size, and a scenario of (Manjil) earthquake (that struck Iran in 1990) was utilized with following earthquake magnitudes (5 and 7), with epicenter distance (3, 10 and 100 km), and depths (2 and 5 km). It was found that, the best soil types for constructions are those with medium and h

In this paper the use of a circular array antenna with adaptive system in conjunction with modified Linearly Constrained Minimum Variance Beam forming (LCMVB) algorithm is proposed to meet the requirement of Angle of Arrival (AOA) estimation in 2-D as well as the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of estimated sources (Three Dimensional 3-D estimation), rather than interference cancelation as it is used for. The proposed system was simulated, tested and compared with the modified Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) technique for 2-D estimation. The results show the system has exhibited astonishing results for simultaneously estimating 3-D parameters with accuracy approximately equivalent to the MUSIC technique (for estimating elevation and a

Consuming of by-product or waste materials in highway engineering is significant in the construction of new roads and/or in renovations of the existing ones. Pulverised Fuel ash (PFA), which is a by-product material of burning coal in power stations, is one of these materials that might be incorporated instead of mineral filler in hot asphalt mixtures.

Two types of surface course mixtures have been prepared one with conventional mineral filler i.e. ordinary Portland cement (OPC) while the second was with PFA. Several testings have been conducted to indicate the mechanical properties which were Marshall Stability and Indirect Tensile Strength tests. On the other hand, moisture damage and ageing have been evaluated

Polyaniline (PANI) and Ag/PANI nanocomposite thin films have prepared by microwave induced plasma. The Ag powder of average particle size of 50 nm, were used to prepare Ag/PANI nanocomposite thin films. The Ag/PANI nanocomposite thin films prepared by polymerization in plasma and characterized by UV-VIS, FTIR, AFM and SEM to study the effect of silver nanoparticles on the optical properties, morphology and structure of the thin films. The optical properties studies showed that the energy band gap of the Ag/PANI (5%wt silver) decreased from 3.6 to 3.2 eV, where the substrate location varied from 4.4 to 3.4 cm from the axis of the cylindrical plasma chamber. Also the optical energy gap decreased systematically from 3.3 to 3 eV with increas

Zinc Oxide (ZnO) is considered as one of the best materials already used as a window layer in solar cells due to its antireflective capability. The ZnO/MgF2 bilayer thin film is more efficient as antireflective coating. In this work, ZnO and ZnO/MgF2 thin films were deposited on glass substrate using pulsed laser deposition and thermal evaporation deposition methods. The optical measurements indicated that ZnO thin layer has an energy gap of (3.02 eV) while ZnO/MgF2 bilayer gives rise to an increase in the energy gap. ZnO/MgF2 bilayer shows a high energy gap (3.77 eV) with low reflectance (1.1-10 %) and refractive index (1.9) leading to high transmittance, this bilayer could be a good candidate optical material to improve the performance

Abstract

    This work deals with a numerical investigation to evaluate the utilization of a water pipe buried inside a roof to reduce the heat gain and minimize the transmission of heat energy inside the conditioning space in summer season.     The numerical results of this paper showed that the reduction in heat gain and energy saving could be occurred with specific values of parameters, like the number of pipes per square meter, the ratio of pipe diameter to the roof thickness, and the pipe inlet water temperature. Comparing with a normal roof (without pipes), the results indicated a significant reduction in energy heat gain which is about 37.8% when the number of pipes per m

Ultrasound has been used as a diagnostic modality for many intraocular diseases, due its safety, low cost, real time and wide availability. Unfortunately, ultrasound images suffer from speckle artifact that are tissue dependent. In this work, we will offer a method to reduce speckle noise and improve ultrasound image to raise the human diagnostic performance. This method combined undecimated wavelet transform with a wavelet coefficient mapping function: where UDWT used to eliminate the noise and a wavelet coefficient mapping function used to enhance the contrast of denoised images obtained from the first component. This methods can be used not only as a means for improving visual quality of medical images but also as a preprocessing

Background. “Polyetheretherketone (PEEK)” is a biocompatible, high-strength polymer that is well-suited for use in dental applications due to its unique properties. However, achieving good adhesion between PEEK and hydrophilic materials such as dental adhesives or cement can be challenging. Also, this hydrophobicity may affect the use of PEEK as an implant material. Surface treatment or conditioning is often necessary to improve surface properties. The piranha solution is the treatment of choice to be explored for this purpose. Methods. PEEK disks of 10 mm diameter and 2 mm thickness were used in this study. Those samples were divided into five groups (each group has five samples). The first is the control group, in which no

Alumina thin films have significant applications in the areas of optoelectronics, optics, electrical insulators, sensors and tribology. The novel aspect of this work is that the homogeneous alumina thin films were prepared in several stages to generate a plasma jet. In this paper, aluminium nanoparticles suspended in vinyl alcohol were prepared using exploding wire plasma. TEM analysis was used to determine the size and shape of particles in aluminium and vinyl alcohol suspensions; the TEM images showed that the particle size is 17.2 nm. Aluminium/poly vinyl alcohol (Al/PVA) thin films were prepared using this suspension on quartz substrate by plasma jet technique at room temperature with an argon gas flow rate of 1 L/min. The Al/PV

The matter of handwritten text recognition is as yet a major challenge to mainstream researchers. A few ways deal with this challenge have been endeavored in the most recent years, for the most part concentrating on the English pre-printed or handwritten characters space. Consequently, the need to effort a research concerning to Arabic texts handwritten recognition. The Arabic handwriting presents unique technical difficulties because it is cursive, right to left in writing and the letters convert its shapes and structures when it is putted at initial, middle, isolation or at the end of words. In this study, the Arabic text recognition is developed and designed to recognize image of Arabic text/characters. The proposed model gets a single l