Drought is a natural phenomenon in many arid, semi-arid, or wet regions. This showed that no region worldwide is excluded from the occurrence of drought. Extreme droughts were caused by global weather warming and climate change. Therefore, it is essential to review the studies conducted on drought to use the recommendations made by the researchers on drought. The drought was classified into meteorological, agricultural, hydrological, and economic-social. In addition, researchers described the severity of the drought by using various indices which required different input data. The indices used by various researchers were the Joint Deficit Index (JDI), Effective Drought Index (EDI), Streamflow Drought Index (SDI), Standard Precipitation Index (SPI), Standard Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), and Palmer Index (PI). According to the researchers in hydrology and for the most accurate description of the drought, more than one indicator for drought should be used. Most reviewed studies recommended using the Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) as the best indicator to describe the drought.
The virtual decomposition control (VDC) is an efficient tool suitable to deal with the full-dynamics-based control problem of complex robots. However, the regressor-based adaptive control used by VDC to control every subsystem and to estimate the unknown parameters demands specific knowledge about the system physics. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on reorganizing the equation of the VDC for a serial chain manipulator using the adaptive function approximation technique (FAT) without needing specific system physics. The dynamic matrices of the dynamic equation of every subsystem (e.g. link and joint) are approximated by orthogonal functions due to the minimum approximation errors produced. The contr
This investigation proposed an identification system of offline signature by utilizing rotation compensation depending on the features that were saved in the database. The proposed system contains five principle stages, they are: (1) data acquisition, (2) signature data file loading, (3) signature preprocessing, (4) feature extraction, and (5) feature matching. The feature extraction includes determination of the center point coordinates, and the angle for rotation compensation (θ), implementation of rotation compensation, determination of discriminating features and statistical condition. During this work seven essential collections of features are utilized to acquire the characteristics: (i) density (D), (ii) average (A), (iii) s
... Show MoreThe performance of a solar assisted desiccant cooling system for a meeting-hall located in the College of Engineering/University of Baghdad was evaluated theoretically. The system was composed of four components; a solar air heater, a desiccant dehumidifier, a heat exchanger and an evaporative cooler. A computer simulation was developed by using MATLAB to assess the effect of various design and operating conditions on the performance of the system and its components. The actual weather data on recommended days were used to assess the load variation and the system performance during those days. The radiant time series method (RTS) was used to evaluate the hourly variation of the cooling load. Four operation modes were employed for perform
... Show MoreA novel demountable shear connector is proposed to link a concrete slab to steel sections in a way that resulting steel-concrete composite floor is demountable, i.e. it can be easily dismantled at the end of its service life. The proposed connectors consist of two parts: the first part is a hollow steel tube with internal threads at its lower end. The second part is a compatible partially threaded bolted stud. After linking the stud to the steel section, the hollow steel tube can be fastened over the threaded stud, which create a complete demountable shear connector. The connector is suitable for use in both composite bridges and buildings, and using cast in-situ slabs, precast solid slabs, or hollow-core precast slabs. A series of push-off
... Show MoreA concept of indoor solar illumination is described and simulated. The solar illumination system is composed of a tracking primary reflector, a selective secondary reflector, a visible light guide and a scattering solid glass tube fixture. Each part of the solar illumination system is optically suited and compatible with other parts to realize high efficiency. The simulation is conducted for Baghdad city for a library hall. Two major days over a year are chosen to investigate the illumination system for acceptable visible light level for reading hall. The two days are: summer solstice day and winter solstice day at 8:00 AM and 12:00 PM for each. Research results showed that the design of the solar system is achieved on the base of minimu
... Show MoreLeap Motion Controller (LMC) is a gesture sensor consists of three infrared light emitters and two infrared stereo cameras as tracking sensors. LMC translates hand movements into graphical data that are used in a variety of applications such as virtual/augmented reality and object movements control. In this work, we intend to control the movements of a prosthetic hand via (LMC) in which fingers are flexed or extended in response to hand movements. This will be carried out by passing in the data from the Leap Motion to a processing unit that processes the raw data by an open-source package (Processing i3) in order to control five servo motors using a micro-controller board. In addition, haptic setup is proposed using force sensors (F
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