A lack of adequate building maintenance is a significant obstacle faced by governmental hospitals. This paper evaluates factors that negatively impact building-maintenance practices in Iraq. A literature review was conducted to identify factors affecting maintenance. A list of 42 factors affecting hospital-buildings was collected from previous studies and tested using a structured questionnaire distributed to hospital-maintenance experts. During the data analysis, 76 valid questionnaires were used. Based on the respondents’ ratings, the relative-importance index (RII) was used to determine the level of importance of each factor. From the results, it was concluded that twelve factors affect maintenance practices in hospital buildin

Energy use is second to staffing in building operating costs. Sustainable technology in the energy sector is based on utilizing renewable sources of energy such as solar, wind, glazing systems, insulation. Other areas of focus include heating, ventilation and air conditioning; novel materials and construction methods; improved sensors and monitoring systems; and advanced simulation tools that can help building designers make more energy efficient choices. The objective of this research is studying the effect of insulations on energy consumption of buildings in Iraq and identifying the amount of energy savings from application th

In Australia, most of the existing buildings were designed before the release of the Australian standard for earthquake actions in 2007. Therefore, many existing buildings in Australia lack adequate seismic design, and their seismic performance must be assessed. The recent earthquake that struck Mansfield, Victoria near Melbourne elevated the need to produce fragility curves for existing reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in Australia. Fragility curves are frequently utilized to assess buildings’ seismic performance and it is defined as the demand probability surpassing capacity at a given intensity level. Numerous factors can influence the results of the fragility assessment of RC buildings. Among the most important factors that can affe

In the present research a new test rig has been proposed to be suitable for different cyclic loads such as cyclic bending, cyclic torsion, proportional and non proportional loads. In this work the efforts were concentrated on the cyclic bending loads concerning cracked pipes with or without internal pulsing pressure to study crack propagation in small bore pipes (up to 1'') for transverse or inclined cracks. The rig simulates the real service conditions under different stresses by means the least dangerous case will be suggested, so the experiments were considered for copper pipe, and the results have been tabulated and drawn to demonstrate the crack growth behavior as well as to justify the outcomes practically, consequently the durabil

The different interactions between cometary tail and solar wind ions are studied in the present paper based on three-dimensional Lax explicit method. The model used in this research is based on the continuity equations describing the cometary tail-solar wind interactions. Three dimensional system was considered in this paper. Simulation of the physical system was achieved using computer code written using Matlab 7.0. The parameters studied here assumed Halley comet type and include the particle density , the particles velocity v, the magnetic field strength B, dynamic pressure p and internal energy E. The results of the present research showed that the interaction near the cometary nucleus is mainly affected by the new ions added to the

This paper describes the use of microcomputer as a laboratory instrument system. The system is focused on three weather variables measurement, are temperature, wind speed, and wind direction. This instrument is a type of data acquisition system; in this paper we deal with the design and implementation of data acquisition system based on personal computer (Pentium) using Industry Standard Architecture (ISA)bus. The design of this system involves mainly a hardware implementation, and the software programs that are used for testing, measuring and control. The system can be used to display the required information that can be transferred and processed from the external field to the system. A visual basic language with Microsoft foundation cl