This paper is devoted to investigate the effect of internal curing technique on the properties of self-compacting concrete. In this study, self-compacting concrete is produced by using limestone powder as partial replacement by weight of cement with percentage of (5%), sand is partially replaced by volume with saturated fine lightweight aggregate which is thermostone aggregate as internal curing material in three percentages of (5%, 10%, 15%) for self-compacting concrete, and the use of two external curing conditions which are water and air. The experimental work was divided into three parts: in the first part, the workability tests of fresh self-compacting concrete were conducted. The second part included conducting compressive str

This paper focus on study the variations of monthly tropospheric NO₂ concentrations over three Iraqi cities Baghdad (33.3° N, 44.4° E), Basrah (30.56° N, 47.8° E) and Erbil (36.3° N, 44.06° E). Monthly NO₂ retrievals from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) onboard Aura satellite during the period from October 2004 to March 2013 have been used.  The results show a high monthly and annual NO₂ concentrations at Baghdad than Basra and Erbil may be attribute to high densely populations and a high economic activity. During the whole period, Baghdad, Basrah and Erbil were exhibited an average of NO₂ (8.1±2.5), (3.7±1.3) and (3.3±1.7) in unit 10¹⁵ molecules

Blood samples were collected from (31) pregnant women infected with cytomegalovirus , also (15) blood samples were collected from congenitally infected infants, and (20),(15),(15) blood samples were collected from pregnant women ,non pregnant and infants, respectively, all of them were as control groups. CMV infection identified by using ELISA assay to detect specific CMV IgM & IgG in sera. The results of lymphocyte transformation showed a significant decrease when phytoheamagglutinin (PHA) used as stimulator, lymphocytes response in infected pregnant women was lower than that of non infected pregnant women as well as non pregnant women. Result also showed a significant decrease in the ability of lymphocyte division in healthy pregnant w

Facial recognition has been an active field of imaging science. With the recent progresses in computer vision development, it is extensively applied in various areas, especially in law enforcement and security. Human face is a viable biometric that could be effectively used in both identification and verification. Thus far, regardless of a facial model and relevant metrics employed, its main shortcoming is that it requires a facial image, against which comparison is made. Therefore, closed circuit televisions and a facial database are always needed in an operational system. For the last few decades, unfortunately, we have experienced an emergence of asymmetric warfare, where acts of terrorism are often committed in secluded area with no

The invention relates to a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) for determining a measuring position of a probe. The AACMM isdepends on the robotkinematics (forward and reverse) in their measurementprinciple, i.e., using the AACMM links and joint angles todetermine the exact workspace or part coordinates. Hence, themeasurements are obtained using an AACMM will be extremely accurate and precise since that ismerely dependent on rigid structural parameters and the only source of measurement error is due to human operators. In this paper, a new AACMM design was proposed. The new AACMM design addresses common issues such as solving the complex kinematics, overcoming the workspace limitation, avoiding singularity, and eliminating the effects of

Researches in the field of evaluation of industrial products emotionally are internationally new and non-existing in the Arabic speaking countries, which is considered the crux of the problem in the current research, in addition to the need of the designers and design students to know how to measure the emotional responses for the industrial product in order to get benefit from them in their designs. The research objective is to get a tool that uses emojis in measuring the emotional responses for the products. The researcher designed an emotional verbal wheel and emojis wheel. The sample of the research consisted of (7) chairs different in design and use, and the respondents were (89) students. The most important results are:
1- Desi

Production of fatty acid esters (biodiesel) from oleic acid and 2-ethylhexanol using sulfated zirconia as solid catalyst for the production of biodiesel was investigated in this work.

       The parameters studied were temperature of reaction (100 to 130°C), molar ratio of alcohol to free fatty acid (1:1 to 3:1), concentration of catalyst (0.5 to 3%wt), mixing speed (500 to 900 rpm) and types of sulfated zirconia (i.e modified, commercial, prepared  catalyst according to literature and reused catalyst). The results show the best conversion to biodiesel was 97.74% at conditions of 130°C, 3:1, 2wt% and 650 rpm using modified catalyst respectively. Also, modified c

  In the present paper, Arabic Character Recognition  Edge detection method based on contour and connected components  is proposed. First stage contour extraction feature is introduced to tackle the Arabic characters edge detection problem, where the aim is to extract the edge information presented in the Arabic characters, since it is crucial to understand the character content.         The second stage connected components appling for the same characters to find edge detection. The proposed approach exploits a number of connected components, which move on the character by character intensity values, to establish matrix, which represents the edge information at each pixel location .

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the hydraulic performance and efficiency of using direction diverting blocks, DDBs, fixed on the surface on an Ogee spillway in reducing the acceleration and dissipating the energy of the incoming supercritical flow. Fifteen types of DDB models were made from wood with a triangulate shape and different sizes were used. Investigation tests on pressure distribution at the DDBs boundaries were curried out to insure there is no negative pressures is developed that cause cavitation. In these tests, thirty six test runs were accomplished by using six types of blocks with the same size but differ in apex angle. Results of these test showed no negative pressures developed at the boundarie