Globally, Sustainability is very quickly becoming a fundamental requirement of the construction industry as it delivers its projects; whether buildings or infrastructures. Throughout more than two decades, many modeling schemes, evaluation tools, and rating systems have been introduced en route to realizing sustainable construction. Many of these, however, lack consensus on evaluation criteria, a robust scientific model that captures the logic behind their sustainability performance evaluation, and therefore experience discrepancies between rated results and actual performance. Moreover, very few of the evaluation tools available satisfactorily address infrastructure projects. The research introduces a system engineering model that abstracts the environment, the construction product, and its production system as three interacting systems that exchange materials, energy, and information. The model utilizes this setup to capture and quantify essential flows exchanged between such three systems, to evaluate sustainability. The research walks through the development of a generic case of the model, and then demonstrates its utility in evaluating the sustainability performance of civil infrastructure projects. The developed model will address an identified gap within the current body of knowledge by considering infrastructure projects. Through the ability to simulate different scenarios, the model will enable identifying which activities, products, and processes impact the environment more, and hence potential areas for optimization and improvement.
Recently, the phenomenon of the spread of fake news or misinformation in most fields has taken on a wide resonance in societies. Combating this phenomenon and detecting misleading information manually is rather boring, takes a long time, and impractical. It is therefore necessary to rely on the fields of artificial intelligence to solve this problem. As such, this study aims to use deep learning techniques to detect Arabic fake news based on Arabic dataset called the AraNews dataset. This dataset contains news articles covering multiple fields such as politics, economy, culture, sports and others. A Hybrid Deep Neural Network has been proposed to improve accuracy. This network focuses on the properties of both the Text-Convolution Neural
... Show MoreSpraying pesticides is one of the most common procedures that is conducted to control pests. However, excessive use of these chemicals inversely affects the surrounding environments including the soil, plants, animals, and the operator itself. Therefore, researchers have been encouraged to...
Moisture induced damage in asphaltic pavement might be considered as a serious defect that contributed to growth other distresses such as permanent deformation and fatigue cracking. This paper work aimed through an experimental effort to assess the behaviour of asphaltic mixtures that fabricated by incorporating several dosages of carbon fiber in regard to the resistance potential of harmful effect of moisture in pavement. Laboratory tests were performed on specimens containing fiber with different lengths and contents. These tests are: Marshall Test, the indirect tensile test and the index of retained strength. The optimum asphalt contents were determined based on the Marshall method. The preparation of asphaltic mixtures involved
... Show MoreThe road transportation system is considered as major component of the infrastructure in any country, it affects the developments in economy and social activities. The Asphalt Concrete which is considered as the major pavement material for the road transportation system in Baghdad is subjected to continuous deterioration with time due to traffic loading and environmental conditions, it was felt that implementing a comprehensive pavement maintenance management system (PMMS), which should be capable for preserving the functional and structural conditions of pavement layers, is essential. This work presents the development of PMMS with Visual inspection technique for evaluating the Asphalt Concrete pavement surface condition; common types o
... Show MoreProduction of fatty acid esters (biodiesel) from oleic acid and 2-ethylhexanol using sulfated zirconia as solid catalyst for the production of biodiesel was investigated in this work.
The parameters studied were temperature of reaction (100 to 130°C), molar ratio of alcohol to free fatty acid (1:1 to 3:1), concentration of catalyst (0.5 to 3%wt), mixing speed (500 to 900 rpm) and types of sulfated zirconia (i.e modified, commercial, prepared catalyst according to literature and reused catalyst). The results show the best conversion to biodiesel was 97.74% at conditions of 130°C, 3:1, 2wt% and 650 rpm using modified catalyst respectively. Also, modified c
... Show MoreObjective: The objective of this study was to prepare nanosuspension of a practical water insoluble antiulcer drug which is lafutidine to enhance the solubility, dissolution rate with studying the effect of different formulation variables to obtain the best formula with appropriate physical properties and higher dissolution rate.Methods: Nanosuspension of lafutidine was prepared using solvent anti-solvent precipitation method using Polyvinylpyrrolidone K-90(PVP K-90) as the stabilizer. Ten formulations were prepared to show the effect of different variables in which two formulations showed the effect of stabilizer type, three formulations showed the effect of stabilizer concentration, two formulations showed the effect of combinatio
... Show MoreBiodiesel as an attractive energy source; a low-cost and green synthesis technique was utilized for biodiesel preparation via waste cooking oil methanolysis using waste snail shell derived catalyst. The present work aimed to investigate the production of biodiesel fuel from waste materials. The catalyst was greenly synthesized from waste snail shells throughout a calcination process at different calcination time of 2–4 h and temperature of 750–950 ◦C. The catalyst samples were characterized using X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), Energy Dispersive X-ray (EDX), and Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR). The reaction variables varying in the range of 10:1–30:1 M ratio of MeOH: oil, 3–11 wt% catalyst loading, 50–
... Show MoreThe present study addresses the behavior of gases in cultivation media as an essential factor to develop the relationship between the microorganisms that are present in the same environment. This relationship was explained via mass transfer of those gases to be a reasonable driving force in changing biological trends. Stripping and dissolution of oxygen and carbon dioxide in water and dairy wastewater were investigated in this study. Bubble column bioreactor under thermal control system was constructed and used for these processes. The experimental results showed that the removal of gases from the culture media requires more time than the dissolution. For example, the volumetric mass transfer coefficient for the removal
... Show MoreFor a given loading, the stiffness of a plate or shell structure can be increased significantly by the addition of ribs or stiffeners. Hitherto, the optimization techniques are mainly on the sizing of the ribs. The more important issue of identifying the optimum location of the ribs has received little attention. In this investigation, finite element analysis has been achieved for the determination of the optimum locations of the ribs for a given set of design constraints. In the conclusion, the author underlines the optimum positions of the ribs or stiffeners which give the best results.