In the field of construction project management, time and cost are the most important factors to be considered in planning every project, and their relationship is complex. The total cost for each project is the sum of the direct and indirect cost. Direct cost commonly represents labor, materials, equipment, etc.
Indirect cost generally represents overhead cost such as supervision, administration, consultants, and interests. Direct cost grows at an increasing rate as the project time is reduced from its original planned time. However, indirect cost continues for the life of the project and any reduction in project time means a reduction in indirect cost. Therefore, there is a trade-off between the time and cost for completing construc

The present work is devoted to investigate the performance of a homemade Y-shape catalytic microreactor for degradation of dibenzothiophene (DBT), as a model of sulphur compounds including in gas oil, utilizing solar incident energy. The microchannel was coated with TiO2 nanoparticles which were used as a photocatalyst. Performance of the microreactor was investigated using different conditions (e.g., DBT concentration, LHSV, operating temperature, and (H₂O₂/DBT) ratio). Our experiments show that, in the absence of UV light, no reaction takes place. The results revealed that outlet concentration of DBT decreases as the mean residence time in the microreactor increases. Also, it was noted that operating temperature s

The exploitation of obsolete recyclable resources including paper waste has the advantages of saving resources and environment protection. This study has been conducted to study utilizing paper waste to adsorb phenol which is one of the harmful organic compound byproducts deposited in the environment. The influence of different agitation methods, pH of the solution (3-11), initial phenol concentration (30-120ppm), adsorbent dose (0.5-2.5 g) and contact time (30-150 min) were studied. The highest phenol removal efficiency obtained was 86% with an adsorption capacity of 5.1 mg /g at optimization conditions (pH of 9, initial phenol concentration of 30 mg/L, an adsorbent dose of 2 g and contact time of 120min and at room temperature).

Compaction curves are widely used in civil engineering especially for road constructions, embankments, etc. Obtaining the precise amount of Optimum Moisture Content (OMC) that gives the Maximum Dry Unit weight g_dmax. is very important, where the desired soil strength can be achieved in addition to economic aspects.

In this paper, three peak functions were used to obtain the OMC and g_dmax. through curve fitting for the values obtained from Standard Proctor Test. Another surface fitting was also used to model the Ohio’s compaction curves that represent the very large variation of compacted soil types.

The results showed very good correlation between the values obtained from some publ

Digital Models of Elevations (DEMs) Using Surfer 16, which are interpolated to create three-dimensional controls for the entire terrain, are typically used in visualization of geospatial entities. The interpolation method used determines how accurate the resulting terrain model will be, hence it is necessary to compare the effectiveness of various approaches in this situation. Numerous generic interpolation techniques, using inverse distance to a power, triangulation as with linear interpolation, the nearest neighbor, and kriging, have been studied. These interpolation techniques produced DEMs. With the aid of SURFER software 16, the primary goal of this effort was to introduce the DEM using a spatial interpolation method and to pre

Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) is an important technology for applications that require speedy, high-accuracy processing of a huge volume of hand-filled forms. The aim of this technology is to reduce manual work, human effort, high accuracy in assessment, and minimize time for evaluation answer sheets. This paper proposed OMR by using Modify Bidirectional Associative Memory (MBAM), MBAM has two phases (learning and analysis phases), it will learn on the answer sheets that contain the correct answers by giving its own code that represents the number of correct answers, then detection marks from answer sheets by using analysis phase. This proposal will be able to detect no selection or select more than one choice, in addition, using M

This study was aimed to measure marketing efficiency and study important factors affecting , using TOBIT qualitative response model for wheat crop in Salahalddin province. Results revealed that independent factors such as (marketing type, crops duration in the field, average marketing cost, distance between farm and marketing center, and average productivity) had an impact on wheat marketing efficiency. This impact varied in size and direction due to value of parameters. Values of marketing efficiency fluctuated within cities and towns in the province. The average value on the province level was 76.75%. This study was recommended developing marketing infrastructures which is essential to efficiency increases. In addition, it is impo

This work focuses on the use of biologically produced activated carbon for improving the physi-co-chemical properties of water samples obtained from the Tigris River. An eco-friendly and low-cost activated carbon was prepared from the Alhagi plant using potassium hydroxide (KOH) as an impregnation agent. The prepared activated carbon was characterised using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy to determine the functional groups that exist on the raw material (Alhagi plant) and Alhagi activated carbon (AAC). Scanning electron microscope–energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscope was also used to investigate the surface shape and the elements that compose the powder. Brunauer–Emmett–Teller surface area analysis was used to evaluate the spe

In this paper, we introduce a DCT based steganographic method for gray scale images. The embedding approach is designed to reach efficient tradeoff among the three conflicting goals; maximizing the amount of hidden message, minimizing distortion between the cover image and stego-image,and maximizing the robustness of embedding. The main idea of the method is to create a safe embedding area in the middle and high frequency region of the DCT domain using a magnitude modulation technique. The magnitude modulation is applied using uniform quantization with magnitude Adder/Subtractor modules. The conducted test results indicated that the proposed method satisfy high capacity, high preservation of perceptual and statistical properties of the steg