Background:  Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a common joint disorder leading to considerable pain and locomotor disability in lower limb function. Locomotor disability, which is difficulty in activities of daily living related to lower limb function, can be the consequence of KOA, so early diagnosis and management may improve quality of life.

Objective: To assess the contribution of radiological osteoarthritis of the knees to disability in the activities of daily living related to lower limb function.

 Methods: One hundred twenty Iraqi KOA patients (104 females and 16 males) who were attending to Rheumatology Unit, Full history was taken and complete clinical exami

The Sliding Mode Control (SMC) has been among powerful control techniques increasingly. Much attention is paid to both theoretical and practical aspects of disciplines due to their distinctive characteristics such as insensitivity to bounded matched uncertainties, reduction of the order of sliding equations of motion, decoupling mechanical systems design. In the current study, two-link robot performance in the Classical SMC is enhanced via Adaptive Sliding Mode Controller (ASMC) despite uncertainty, external disturbance, and coulomb friction. The key idea is abstracted as follows: switching gains are depressed to the low allowable values, resulting in decreased chattering motion and control's efforts of the two-link robo

Evaporation is one of the major components of the hydrological cycle in the nature, thus its accurate estimation is so important in the planning and management of the irrigation practices and to assess water availability and requirements. The aim of this study is to investigate the ability of fuzzy inference system for estimating monthly pan evaporation form meteorological data. The study has been carried out depending on 261 monthly measurements of each of temperature (T), relative humidity (RH), and wind speed (W) which have been available in Emara meteorological station, southern Iraq. Three different fuzzy models comprising various combinations of monthly climatic variables (temperature, wind speed, and relative humidity) were developed

The Planning and Resource Development Department of the Iraqi Ministry of Health is very interested in improving medical care, health education, and village training programs. Accordingly, and through the available capabilities of the ministry, itdesires to allocate seven health centers to four villages in Baghdad, Iraq therefore the ministry needs to determine the number of health centers allocated to each of these villages which achieves the greatest degree of the overall effectiveness of the seven health centers in a fuzzy environment. The objective of this study is to use a fuzzy dynamic programming(DP) method to determine the optimal allocation of these centers, which allows the greatest overall effectiveness of these health centers

In the modern world, wind turbine (WT) has become the largest source of renewable energy. The horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) has higher efficiency than the vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT). The blade pitch angle (BPA) of WT is controlled to increase output power generation over the rated wind speed. This paper proposes an accurate controller for BPA in a 500-kw HAWT. Three types of controllers have been applied and compared to find the best controller: PID controller (PIDC), fuzzy logic type-2 controller (T2FLC), and hybrid type-2 fuzzy-PID controller (T2FPIDC). This paper has been used Mamdani and Sugeno fuzzy inference systems (FIS) to find the best inference system for WT controllers. Furthermore, genetic algorithm (GA) and particl

Micro metal forming has an application potential in different industrial fields. Flexible tool-assisted sheet metal forming at micro scale is among the forming techniques that have increasingly attracted wide attention of researchers. This forming process is a suitable technique for producing micro components because of its inexpensive process, high quality products and relatively high production rate. This study presents a novel micro deep drawing technique through using floating ring as an assistant die with flexible pad as a main die. The floating ring designed with specified geometry is located between the process workpiece and the rubber pad. The function of the floating ring in this work is to produce SS304 micro cups with profile

Traffic loading and environmental factors are among the most serious variables that cause the spoilage of flexible pavements and lead to a decrease in their design life. The objective of this study is to investigate the influence of axle load raise and the change in resilient modulus on the flexible pavement design life. Locally, Highway geometric design code for Iraqi building code has assign certain admissible maximum load limits per every axle truck type that should not be overrun. In this paper nine different axle truck loads (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16) tons, single axle with dual tire and, and two different resilient moduli of asphalt pavement were chosen. The evaluation was carried out assuming high temperature to represent