In this study, pebble bed as an absorber and storage material was placed in a south facing, flat plate air-type solar collector at fixed tilt angle of (45°). The effect of this material and differ- ent parameters on collector efficiency has been investigated experimentally and
theoretically. Two operation modes were employed to study the performance of the solar air heater. An inte- grated mode of continuous operation of the system during the period of (11:00 am – 3:00 pm) and non-integrated mode in which the system stored the solar energy through the day then used the stored energy during the period of (3:00 pm – 8:00 pm). The results of parametric study in case of continuous operating showed that the maximum average temperatur

Numeral recognition is considered an essential preliminary step for optical character recognition, document understanding, and others. Although several handwritten numeral recognition algorithms have been proposed so far, achieving adequate recognition accuracy and execution time remain challenging to date. In particular, recognition accuracy depends on the features extraction mechanism. As such, a fast and robust numeral recognition method is essential, which meets the desired accuracy by extracting the features efficiently while maintaining fast implementation time. Furthermore, to date most of the existing studies are focused on evaluating their methods based on clean environments, thus limiting understanding of their potential a

Laser is a powerful device that has a wide range of applications in fields ranging from materials science and manufacturing to medicine and fibre optic communications. One remarkable

This paper experimentally investigates the heating process of a hot water supply using a neural network implementation of a self-tuning PID controller on a microcontroller system. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm employed in system tuning proved very effective, as it is simple and fast optimization algorithm. The PSO method for the PID parameters is executed on the Matlab platform in order to put these parameters in the real-time digital PID controller, which was experimented with in a pilot study on a microcontroller platform. Instead of the traditional phase angle power control (PAPC) method, the Cycle by Cycle Power Control (CBCPC) method is implemented because it yields better power factor and eliminates harmonics

One of the main parts in hydraulic system is directional control valve, which is needed in order to operate hydraulic actuator. Practically, a conventional directional control valve has complex construction and moving parts, such as spool. Alternatively, a proposed Magneto-rheological (MR) directional control valve can offer a better solution without any moving parts by means of MR fluid. MR fluid consists of stable suspension of micro-sized magnetic particles dispersed in carrier medium like hydrocarbon oil. The main objectives of this present research are to design a MR directional control valve using MR fluid, to analyse its magnetic circuit using FEMM software, and to study and simulate the performance of this valve. In this research, a

Flow-production systems whose pieces are connected in a row may not have maintenance scheduling procedures fixed because problems occur at different times (electricity plants, cement plants, water desalination plants). Contemporary software and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are used to fulfill the research objectives by developing a predictive maintenance program. The data of the fifth thermal unit of the power station for the electricity of Al Dora/Baghdad are used in this study. Three stages of research were conducted. First, missing data without temporal sequences were processed. The data were filled using time series hour after hour and the times were filled as system working hours, making the volume of the data relativel

The control of an aerial flexible joint robot (FJR) manipulator system with underactuation is a difficult task due to unavoidable factors, including, coupling, underactuation, nonlinearities, unmodeled uncertainties, and unpredictable external disturbances. To mitigate those issues, a new robust fixed-time sliding mode control (FxTSMC) is proposed by using a fixed-time sliding mode observer (FxTSMO) for the trajectory tracking problem of the FJR attached to the drones system. First, the underactuated FJR is comprehensively modeled and converted to a canonical model by employing two state transformations for ease of the control design. Then, based on the availability of the measured states, a cascaded FxTSMO (CFxTSMO) is constructed to estim