The purpose of this study is to avoid delays and cost changes that occur in emergency reconstruction projects especially in post disaster circumstances. This study is aimed to identify the factors that affect the real construction period and the real cost of a project against the estimated period of construction and the estimated cost of the project. The case study is related to the construction projects in Iraq. Thirty projects in different areas of construction in Iraq were selected as a sample for this study. Project participants from the projects authorities provided data about the projects through a data collection distributed survey made by the authors. Mathematical data analysis was used to construct a model to predict change in time and cost of the projects before the start of the construction. The artificial neural networks analysis was selected as a mathematical approach. The most important factors identified leading to schedule delays and cost increase were contractor failure, redesigning of designs/plans and change orders, security issues, selection of low-price bids, weather factors, and owner failures. The use of the ANN model for such a problem is expected to be an effective method for modeling this complicated phenomenon.
In this paper three techniques for image compression are implemented. The proposed techniques consist of three dimension (3-D) two level discrete wavelet transform (DWT), 3-D two level discrete multi-wavelet transform (DMWT) and 3-D two level hybrid (wavelet-multiwavelet transform) technique. Daubechies and Haar are used in discrete wavelet transform and Critically Sampled preprocessing is used in discrete multi-wavelet transform. The aim is to maintain to increase the compression ratio (CR) with respect to increase the level of the transformation in case of 3-D transformation, so, the compression ratio is measured for each level. To get a good compression, the image data properties, were measured, such as, image entropy (He), percent root-
... Show MoreDifferent solvents (light naphtha, n-heptane, and n-hexane) are used to treat Iraqi Atmospheric oil residue by the deasphalting process. Oil residue from Al-Dura refinery with specific gravity 0.9705, API 14.9, and 0.5 wt. % sulfur content was used. Deasphalting oil (DAO) was examined on a laboratory scale by using solvents with different operation conditions (temperature, concentration of solvent, solvent to oil ratio, and duration time). This study investigates the effects of these parameters on asphaltene yield. The results show that an increase in temperature for all solvents increases the extraction of asphaltene yield. The higher reduction in asphaltene content is obtained with hexane solvent at operating conditions of (90 °C
... Show MoreThe paper presents a neural synchronization into intensive study in order to address challenges preventing from adopting it as an alternative key exchange algorithm. The results obtained from the implementation of neural synchronization with this proposed system address two challenges: namely the verification of establishing the synchronization between the two neural networks, and the public initiation of the input vector for each party. Solutions are presented and mathematical model is developed and presented, and as this proposed system focuses on stream cipher; a system of LFSRs (linear feedback shift registers) has been used with a balanced memory to generate the key. The initializations of these LFSRs are neural weights after achiev
... Show MoreMass transfer was studied using a rotating cylinder electrode with different lengths of legs acting as turbulence promoters. Two types of rotating cylinder ,made of brass, were examined : an enhanced cylinder one, with four rectangular extensions 10 mm long, 10 mm wide, and 1mm thick, and an enhanced cylinder two with four longitudes 30 mm long,10 mm wide, and 1mm thick. The best performance was obtained for enhanced cylinder two at low rotation speeds while enhanced cylinder one was realized at high rotation speeds. The mass transfer enhancement as compared with a normal rotating cylinder electrode, devoid of promoters, is 53% or 58% higher. The enhancement percentage decreased as rotation speeds increased further, since, seemingly, ful
... Show MoreElectrocardiogram (ECG) is an important physiological signal for cardiac disease diagnosis. With the increasing use of modern electrocardiogram monitoring devices that generate vast amount of data requiring huge storage capacity. In order to decrease storage costs or make ECG signals suitable and ready for transmission through common communication channels, the ECG data
volume must be reduced. So an effective data compression method is required. This paper presents an efficient technique for the compression of ECG signals. In this technique, different transforms have been used to compress the ECG signals. At first, a 1-D ECG data was segmented and aligned to a 2-D data array, then 2-D mixed transform was implemented to compress the
This study was aimed to determine a phytotoxicity experiment with kerosene as a model of a total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPHs) as Kerosene pollutant at different concentrations (1% and 6%) with aeration rate (0 and 1 L/min) and retention time (7, 14, 21, 28 and 42 days), was carried out in a subsurface flow system (SSF) on the Barley wetland. It was noted that greatest elimination 95.7% recorded at 1% kerosene levels and aeration rate 1L / min after a period of 42 days of exposure; whereas it was 47% in the control test without plants. Furthermore, the percent of elimination efficiencies of hydrocarbons from the soil was ranged between 34.155%-95.7% for all TPHs (Kerosene) concentrations at aeration rate (0 and 1 L/min). The Barley c
... Show MoreIn this paper, we implement and examine a Simulink model with electroencephalography (EEG) to control many actuators based on brain waves. This will be in great demand since it will be useful for certain individuals who are unable to access some control units that need direct contact with humans. In the beginning, ten volunteers of a wide range of (20-66) participated in this study, and the statistical measurements were first calculated for all eight channels. Then the number of channels was reduced by half according to the activation of brain regions within the utilized protocol and the processing time also decreased. Consequently, four of the participants (three males and one female) were chosen to examine the Simulink model duri
... Show MoreVoice Activity Detection (VAD) is considered as an important pre-processing step in speech processing systems such as speech enhancement, speech recognition, gender and age identification. VAD helps in reducing the time required to process speech data and to improve final system accuracy by focusing the work on the voiced part of the speech. An automatic technique for VAD using Fuzzy-Neuro technique (FN-AVAD) is presented in this paper. The aim of this work is to alleviate the problem of choosing the best threshold value in traditional VAD methods and achieves automaticity by combining fuzzy clustering and machine learning techniques. Four features are extracted from each speech segment, which are short term energy, zero-crossing rate, auto
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