Ankylosing spondylitis is a complex debilitating disease because its pathogenesis is not clear. This study aims at detecting some pathogenesis factors that lead to induce the disease. Chlamydia pneumoniae is one of these pathogenesis factors which acts as a triggering factor for the disease. The study groups included forty Iraqi Ankylosing spondylitis patients and forty healthy persons as a control group. Immunological and molecular examinations were done to detect Chlamydia. pneumoniae in AS group. The immunological results were performed by Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) to detect anti-IgG and anti-IgM antibodies of C. pneumoniae revealed that five of forty AS patients' samples (12.5%) were positive for anti-IgG and IgM C. pneu

In this paper, an experimental study was conducted to enhance the thermal performance of a double-pass solar air heater (SAH) using phase change material (PCM) for thermal storage at climatic conditions of Baghdad city - Iraq. The double-pass solar air heater integrated with thermal storage system was manufactured and tested to ensure that the air heating reserved after the absence of the sun. The rectangular cavity filled with paraffin wax was used as a latent heat storage and incorporated into the lower channel of solar air heater. Experiments were carried out to evaluate the charging and discharging characteristics of two similar designed solar air collectors with and without using phase change material at a constant

Applying a well-performing heat exchanger is an efficient way to fortify the relatively low thermal response of phase-change materials (PCMs), which have broad application prospects in the fields of thermal management and energy storage. In this study, an improved PCM melting and solidification in corrugated (zigzag) plate heat exchanger are numerically examined compared with smooth (flat) plate heat exchanger in both horizontal and vertical positions. The effects of the channel width (0.5 W, W, and 2 W) and the airflow temperature (318 K, 323 K, and 328 K) are exclusively studied and reported. The results reveal the much better performance of the horizontal corrugated configuration compared with the smooth channel during both melti

The process of transporting waste from urban areas to sanitary landfill sites requires large amounts of money due to the length and distance. To address this problem, temporary transfer stations were established by the Municipality of Baghdad to reduce the cost of transportation, and for the purpose of preserving the environment in a sustainable manner, standards were set for the establishment of these stations. The two stations of Al-Karrada Municipality and Al-Shula Municipality were chosen as a case study to measure the extent of adopting and applying the standards for establishing substations locally, regionally and internationally, and the most important results were reached Which is that the transforming (regular) stations of the t

This project sought to fabricate a flexible gas sensor based on a short functionalized multi-walled carbon nanotubes (f-MWCNTs) network for nitrogen dioxide gas detection. The network was prepared by filtration from the suspension (FFS) method and modified by coating with a layer of polypyrrole conductive polymer (PPy) prepared by the oxidative chemical polymerization to improve the properties of the network. The structural, optical, and morphological properties of the f-MWCNTs and f-MWCNTs/PPy network were studied using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourie-transform infrared (FTIR), with an AFM (atomic force microscopy). XRD proved that the structure of f-MWCNTs is unaffected by the synthesis procedure. The FTIR spectra verified the existence o

A biconical antenna has been developed for ultra-wideband sensing. A wide impedance bandwidth of around 115% at bandwidth 3.73-14 GHz is achieved which shows that the proposed antenna exhibits a fairly sensitive sensor for microwave medical imaging applications. The sensor and instrumentation is used together with an improved version of delay and sum image reconstruction algorithm on both fatty and glandular breast phantoms. The relatively new imaging set-up provides robust reconstruction of complex permittivity profiles especially in glandular phantoms, producing results that are well matched to the geometries and composition of the tissues. Respectively, the signal-to-clutter and the signal-to-mean ratios of the improved method are consis

Achieving reliable operation under the influence of deep-submicrometer noise sources including crosstalk noise at low voltage operation is a major challenge for network on chip links. In this paper, we propose a coding scheme that simultaneously addresses crosstalk effects on signal delay and detects up to seven random errors through wire duplication and simple parity checks calculated over the rows and columns of the two-dimensional data. This high error detection capability enables the reduction of operating voltage on the wire leading to energy saving. The results show that the proposed scheme reduces the energy consumption up to 53% as compared to other schemes at iso-reliability performance despite the increase in the overhead number o

Water supply networks are marred by serious risks of imperceptible pipeline leakage, posing ‎sustainability ‎and ‎performance ‎threats.  This article highlights the use of vibratory signal features to get around the drawbacks of traditional methods in a highly detailed framework for leak detection based on CatBoost. demonstrated excellent diagnostic performance and carried out a thorough test performance evaluation on five leakage configurations  . The expected system achieved an accuracy of 98.1% (variance (well within x/3% of expected):, beating traditional competitors such as Random Forest (97.3%) and Support Vector Machine (93.8%). ‎For example, the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve was 0.995, in