The behavior of externally prestressed composite beams under short term loading has been studied. A computer program developed originally by Oukaili to evaluate curvature is modified to evaluate the deflection of prestressed composite beam under flexural load. The analysis model based on the deformation compatibility of entire structure that allows to determine the full history of strain and stress distribution along cross section depth, deflection and stress increment in the external tendons .
The evaluation of curvatures for the composite beam involves iterations for computing the strains vectors at each node at any loading stage. The stress increment determined using equations depended on the member deflection at points of connecti

Construction projects are complicated in nature and require many considerations in contractor selection. One of the complicated interactions is that between performance with the project size, and contractor financial status, and size of projects contracted. At the prequalification stage, the financial ‎requirements restrict the ‎contractors to meet minimum limits in financial criteria such as net worth, working capital and ‎annual turnover, etc. In construction projects, however, there are cases when contractors meet these requirements but show low performance in practice. The model used in the study predicts the performance by training of a neural network. The data used in the study are 72 of the most recent roadw

Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model's application is widely increased for wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) variables prediction and forecasting which can enable the operators to take appropriate action and maintaining the norms. It is much easier modeling tool for dealing with complex nature WWTP modeling comparing with other traditional mathematical models. ANN technique significance has been considered at present study for the prediction of sequencing batch reactor (SBR) performance based on effluent's (BOD5/COD) ratio after collecting the required historical daily SBR data for two years operation (2015-2016) from Baghdad Mayoralty and Al-Rustamiya WWTP office, Iraq. The prediction was gotten by the application of a feed-forwa

In this paper thermo-hydrodynamic characteristics were investigated experimentally for a new type shell-helical coiled tube heat exchanger used as a storage tank of closed loop solar water heater system. Triple concentric helical coils were made of copper tubes of (12.5mm OD and 10mm ID) with coils diameter of (207, 152.2, 97mm) for outer, middle and inner coils respectively. The experiments were carried out during a clear sky days of (March and April 2012). The parameters studied in this work are: history of average temperature of shell side of the storage tank, collector heat gain, heat rejected from coils to shell side of the storage tank, collector efficiency, thermal effectiveness of the heat exchanger (storage tank), and pressure d

In this study, SnS thin films were deposited onto glass substrate by thermal evaporation technique at 300K temperature. The SnS films have been prepared with different thicknesses (100,200 &300) nm. The crystallographic analysis, film thickness, electrical conductivity, carrier concentration, and carrier mobility were characterized. Measurements showed that depending on film thickness. The D.C. conductivity increased with increase in film thickness from 3.720x10-5 (Ω.cm)-1 for 100 nm thickness to 9.442x10-4 (Ω.cm)-1 for 300 nm thicknesses, and the behavior of activation energies, hall mobility, and carrier concentration were also studied.

This study investigates the possibility of using waste plastic as one of the components of expired lead-acid batteries to produce lightweight concrete. Different percentages of lead-acid battery plastic were used in the production of lightweight concrete. The replacements were (70, 80 and 100%) by volume of the fine and coarse aggregate. Results demonstrated that a reduction of approximately 23.6% to 35% in the wet density was observed when replacement of 70% to 100% of the natural aggregate by lead-acid battery plastic. Also, the compressive strength decreased slightly with the increase in plastic content at different curing ages of 7, 28, 60, 90, 120 days. The lowest value of compressive strength was (20.7 MPa) for (wa

Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations were carried out to study the thermal cracking for acenaphthylene molecule to estimate the bond energies for breaking C8b-C5a , C5a-C5 , C5-C4 , and C5-H5 bonds as well as the activation energies. It was found that for C8b-C5a , C5-C4 , and C5-H5 reactions it is often possible to identify one pathway for bond breakage through the singlet or triplet states. The atomic charges , dipole moment and nuclear – nuclear repulsion energy supported the breakage bond .Also, it was found that the activation energy value for C5-H5 bond breakage is lower than that required for C8b-C5a , C5a-C5 , C5-C4 bonds which refer to C5-H5 bond in acenaphthylene molecule are weaker than C8b-C5a , C5a-C5 , C5-C

     A global pandemic has emerged as a result of the widespread coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Deep learning (DL) techniques are used to diagnose COVID-19 based on many chest X-ray. Due to the scarcity of available X-ray images, the performance of DL for COVID-19 detection is lagging, underdeveloped, and suffering from overfitting. Overfitting happens when a network trains a function with an  incredibly high variance to represent the training data perfectly. Consequently, medical images lack the availability of large labeled datasets, and the annotation of medical images is expensive and time-consuming for experts. As the COVID-19 virus is an infectious disease, these datasets are scarce, and it is difficult to get large datasets

Permanent deformation (Rutting) of asphalt  pavements which appears in many roads in Iraq, have caused a major impact on pavement performance by reducing the useful service life of pavement and creating services hazards for highway users. The main objective of this research is investigating the effect of some contributory factors related to permanent deformation of asphalt concrete mixture. To meet the objectives of this research, available local materials are used including asphalt binder, aggregates, mineral filler and modified asphalt binder. The Superpave mix design system was adopted with varying volumetric compositions. The Superpave Gyratory Compactor was used to compact 24 asphalt concrete cylindrical specimens. To collect t

Human beings are greatly inspired by nature. Nature has the ability to solve very complex problems in its own distinctive way. The problems around us are becoming more and more complex in the real time and at the same instance our mother nature is guiding us to solve these natural problems. Nature gives some of the logical and effective ways to find solutions to these problems. Nature acts as an optimized source for solving the complex problems.  Decomposition is a basic strategy in traditional multi-objective optimization. However, it has not yet been widely used in multi-objective evolutionary optimization.   

Although computational strategies for taking care of Multi-objective Optimization Problems (MOPs) h