Institutions and companies are looking to reduce spending on buildings and services according to scientific methods, provided they reach the same purpose but at a lower cost. On this basis, this paper proposes a model to measure and reduce maintenance costs in one of the public sector institutions in Iraq by using performance indicators that fit the nature of the work of this institution and the available data. The paper relied on studying the nature of the institution’s work in the maintenance field and looking at the type of data available to know the type and number of appropriate indicators to create the model. Maintenance data were collected for the previous six years by reviewing the maintenance and financial dep

The effect of the initial pressure upon the laminar flame speed, for a methane-air mixtures, has been detected paractically, for a wide range of equivalence ratio. In this work, a measurement system is designed in order to measure the laminar flame speed using a constant volume method with a thermocouples technique. The laminar  burning velocity is measured, by using the density ratio method. The comparison of the present work results and the previous ones show good agreement between them. This indicates that the measurements and the calculations employed in the present work are successful and precise

Photonic Crystal Fiber Interferometers (PCFIs) are widely used for sensing applications. This work presents the fabrication and the characterization of a relative humidity sensor based on a polymer-coated photonic crystal fiber that operates in a Mach- Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) transmission mode. The fabrication of the sensor involved splicing a short (1 cm) length of Photonic Crystal Fiber (PCF) between two single-mode fibers (SMF). It was then coated with a layer of agarose solution. Experimental results showed that a high humidity sensitivity of 29.37 pm/%RH was achieved within a measurement range of 27–95%RH. The sensor also showed good repeatability, small size, measurement accuracy and wide humidity range. The RH sensitivity o

In modern hydraulic control systems, the trend in hydraulic power applications is to improve efficiency and performance. “Proportional valve” is generally applied to pressure, flow and directional-control valves which continuously convert a variable input signal into a smooth and proportional hydraulic output signal. It creates a variable resistance (orifice) upstream and downstream of a hydraulic actuator, and is meter in/meter out circuit and hence pressure drop, and power losses are inevitable. If velocity (position) feedback is used, flow pattern control is possible. Without aforementioned flow pattern, control is very “loose” and relies on “visual” feed back by the operator. At this point, we should examine how this valv

The main work of this paper is devoted to a new technique of constructing approximated solutions for linear delay differential equations using the basis functions power series functions with the aid of Weighted residual methods (collocations method, Galerkin’s method and least square method).

This research deals with the use of a number of statistical methods, such as the kernel method, watershed, histogram, and cubic spline, to improve the contrast of digital images. The results obtained according to the RSME and NCC standards have proven that the spline method is the most accurate in the results compared to other statistical methods.

Kidney tumors are of different types having different characteristics and also remain challenging in the field of biomedicine. It becomes very important to detect the tumor and classify it at the early stage so that appropriate treatment can be planned. The main objective of this research is to use the Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) algorithms to help the early detection of kidney tumors. In this paper, tried to implement an automated segmentation methods of gray level CT images is used to provide information such as anatomical structure and identifying the Region of Interest (ROI) i.e. locate tumor, lesion and other in kidney.
A CT image has inhomogeneity, noise which affects the continuity and accuracy of the images segmentation. In

Impressed current cathodic protection controlled by computer gives the ideal solution to the changes in environmental factors and long term coating degradation. The protection potential distribution achieved and the current demand on the anode can be regulated to protection criteria, to achieve the effective protection for the system.

In this paper, cathodic protection problem of above ground steel storage tank was investigated by an impressed current of cathodic protection with controlled potential of electrical system to manage the variation in soil resistivity. Corrosion controller has been implemented for above ground tank in LabView where tank's bottom potential to soil was manipulated to the desired set poi

Abstract

Black paint laser peening (bPLP) technique is currently applied for many engineering materials , especially for aluminum alloys due to high improvement in fatigue life and strength . Constant and variable   bending fatigue tests have been performed at RT and stress ratio R= -1 . The results of the present  work observed that the significance of the surface work hardening which generated high negative residual stresses in bPLP specimens .The fatigue life  improvement factor (FLIF)  for bPLP constant fatigue behavior was from 2.543 to 3.3 compared to untreated  fatigue and the increase in fatigue strength at 10⁷ cycle was 21% . The bPLP cumulative fatigue life behav