Iraq is highly dependent on international markets to provide food for its residents. As imported food prices are highly dependent on crude oil prices in global markets, any shock in oil prices will have an impact on food consumption in the country. As a result, it is essential to study the demand for imported food at every time period. To the best of our knowledge as researchers, as not even a single study is available in the literature, this paper is considered the first to study the demand for imported food groups in Iraq. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to estimate demand elasticities for several imported food categories in Iraq. This study uses an Almost Ideal Demand System model to analyze the demand for imported f

Integrated project delivery is collaboratively applying the skills and knowledge of all participants to optimize the project's results, increase owner value, decrease waste, and maximize efficiency during the design, fabrication, and construction processes. This study aims to determine IPD criteria positively impacting value engineering. To do this, the study has considered 9 main criteria according to PMP classification that already covers all project phases and 183 sub-criteria obtained from theoretical study and expert interviews (fieldwork). In this study, the SPSS (V26) program was used to analyze the main criteria and sub-criteria priorities from top to bottom according to their values of the Relative Importance In

Speech recognition is a very important field that can be used in many applications such as controlling to protect area, banking, transaction over telephone network database access service, voice email, investigations, House controlling and management ... etc. Speech recognition systems can be used in two modes: to identify a particular person or to verify a person’s claimed identity. The family speaker recognition is a modern field in the speaker recognition. Many family speakers have similarity in the characteristics and hard to identify between them. Today, the scope of speech recognition is limited to speech collected from cooperative users in real world office environments and without adverse microphone or channel impairments.

Sand production in unconsolidated reservoirs has become a cause of concern for production engineers. Issues with sand production include increased wellbore instability and surface subsidence, plugging of production liners, and potential damage to surface facilities. A field case in southeast Iraq was conducted to predict the critical drawdown pressures (CDDP) at which the well can produce without sanding. A stress and sanding onset models were developed for Zubair reservoir. The results show that sanding risk occurs when rock strength is less than 7,250 psi, and the ratio of shear modulus to the bulk compressibility is less than 0.8 1012 psi2. As the rock strength is increased, the sand free drawdown and depletion becomes larger. The CDDP

Addition of bioactive materials such as Titanium oxide (TiO₂), and incorporation of bio inert ceramic such as alumina (Al₂O₃), into polyetheretherketone (PEEK) has been adopted as an effective approach to improve bone-implant interfaces. In this paper, hot pressing technique has been adopted as a production method. This technique gave a homogenous distribution of the additive materials in the proposed composite biomaterial. Different compositions and compounding temperatures have been applied to all samples. Mechanical properties and animal model have been studied in all different production conditions. The results of these new TiO₂/Al₂O₃/PEEK biocomposites with different

This study presents an adaptive control scheme based on synergetic control theory for suppressing the vibration of building structures due to earthquake. The control key for the proposed controller is based on a magneto-rheological (MR) damper, which supports the building. According to Lyapunov-based stability analysis, an adaptive synergetic control (ASC) strategy was established under variation of the stiffness and viscosity coefficients in the vibrated building. The control and adaptive laws of the ASC were developed to ensure the stability of the controlled structure. The proposed controller addresses the suppression problem of a single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) building model, and an earthquake control scenario was conducted and simulat

Efficient operations and output of outstanding quality distinguish superior manufacturing sectors. The manufacturing process production of bending sheet metal is a form of fabrication in the industry of manufacture in which the plate is bent using punches and dies to the angle of the work design. Product quality is influenced by plate material selection, which includes thickness, type, dimensions, and material. Because no prior research has concentrated on this methodology, this research aims to determine V-bending capacity limits utilizing the press bending method. The inquiry employed finite element analysis (FEA), along with Solidworks was the tool of choice to develop drawings of design and simulations. The ASTM E290

Sub-threshold operation has received a lot of attention in limited performance applications.However, energy optimization of sub-threshold circuits should be performed with the concern of the performance limitation of such circuit. In this paper, a dual size design is proposed for energy minimization of sub-threshold CMOS circuits. The optimal downsizing factor is determined and assigned for some gates on the off-critical paths to minimize the energy at the maximum allowable performance. This assignment is performed using the proposed slack based genetic algorithm which is a heuristic-mixed evolutionary algorithm. Some gates are heuristically assigned to the original and the downsized design based on their slack time determined by static tim

Reading is one of the essential components of the English language. Countries that use English as a second language (ESL) sometimes have difficulties in reading and comprehension. According to many researches, mother tongue has proved some interferences with learning a second language. This study investigated the results of reading difficulties of young second language learners in terms of accuracy, comprehension, and rate using the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability test. The study was carried out in one of the High Schools for Boys in Hyderabad, India and included Grade five, aged 10-12 years. In order to understand the reading difficulties of English as a second language, a qualitative approach was employed. Interview, reading tes

This paper includes a comparison between denoising techniques by using statistical approach, principal component analysis with local pixel grouping (PCA-LPG), this procedure is iterated second time to further improve the denoising performance, and other enhancement filters were used. Like adaptive Wiener low pass-filter to a grayscale image that has been degraded by constant power additive noise, based on statistics estimated from a local neighborhood of each pixel. Performs Median filter of the input noisy image, each output pixel contains the Median value in the M-by-N neighborhood around the corresponding pixel in the input image, Gaussian low pass-filter and Order-statistic filter also be used.

Experimental results shows LPG-