Active Debris Removal Mapping Project

Space debris discussions initiated with the start of the space age 55 years ago and have seen special interest in current years. This is due to the large increase in the number of space debris which has led to an increased threat of collision with operational space systems and of unsafe reentry. Due to this increased interest in this area, many different methods have been proposed in recent years for mitigation and space debris removal, some of which have even secured funding from space agencies for further development. These include ground based lasers and space based systems which use electro-dynamic tethers, solar sails or inflatable components. While each method has its own pros and cons, some of these concepts seem to be more suitable for the short term and others for the long term. This paper identifies major performance measures for space debris removal systems based on current rules and regulations and maps the performance of the ADR technologies based on these criteria. The map can help prioritize removal concepts and required technologies in order to better meet current needs

Experimental and Finite Element Analysis of Lateral Torsional Buckling of Concrete Filled Tubular Flange Steel Girders

The structural behavior of concrete filled Tubular Flange Girders (CFTFGs) has been studied in this research. This study aims to investigate the ability of tubular flange to increase resistance of steel girders against Lateral- Torsional Buckling (LTB). For this purpose, experimental, and numerical analysis were carried out.The experimental work consisted of fabricating and testing of five specimens. The first specimen with flat plate flange considered as a control specimen and the other specimens with tubular flanges. In tubular flanges specimens the effect of filled and non-filled tubular flanges with concrete also, the geometry effect of tubular flange sections, i.e. depth (40 and 20 mm) were studied. These specimens have the same length (1920 mm) and the same overall depth (170 mm). The specimens were tested under two point loads applied at the third-span points. The second part was a numerical one using the finite element method by software package (ANSYS 14), then employed to investigate the nonlinear behavior of tubular flanges girders and a similar numerical study of conventional I-girders was conducted, then the results compared with those of tubular flange girders.The measured experimental results were; the ultimate load capacity, load- vertical deflection, load- lateral deflection and load- twisting angle. Finally, the tubular flange specimens increased the lateral torsional buckling capacity comparing with the standard I-shaped steel members by about (66-97%), while bending strength increased by about (33-55%) for tubular flange section filled with concrete of 42.5 MPa. The concrete filled tubular flange increased the LTB capacity by about (14- 22 %) comparing with the unfilled specimens, also increased the flexural strength by about (13-22%). Thus, tubular flanges girders allowed using for large unbraced girders due to increasing the torsional stiffness of the girder. The numerical models were carried out by software package (ANSYS 14). The results were found to be in a convergent state with those obtained from the experimental tests. Keywords: Lateral–torsional buckling, finite element analysis, and tubular flange girder.

The impact of specialized loans of agricultural banks for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) on the financial returns of the banks in Iraq

The financial development of a country cannot be considered complete without the financial sustainability of its financial institutions, which can be achieved by producing funds from strong investment plans and loans. Policymakers and future researchers must prioritize this element. Therefore, the current study investigates the effect of specialized loans from agricultural banks to SMEs, such as project loans, objective loans, commodity loans, and liquidity loans, on the financial performance of agricultural banks in Iraq. The study retrieved data from the databases of fifteen agricultural banks from 2011 to 2020. The relationship between variables has been examined using the Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR). The results demonstrated a correlation between project financing, objective financing, commodity financing, and liquidity and the financial performance of agricultural banks in Iraq. The article guides decision-makers in the formulation of strategies to increase financial return through the use of specialty loans.Suraa Alaa Jawad (College of Administration and Economics, University of Babylon), Khalid Hussein Ali Al-marzooge (College of Administration and Economics, University of Babylon)Includes bibliographical reference

Enhancing Big Data Analysis by using Map-reduce Technique

Database is defined as a set of data that is organized and distributed in a manner that permits the user to access the data being stored in an easy and more convenient manner. However, in the era of big-data the traditional methods of data analytics may not be able to manage and process the large amount of data. In order to develop an efficient way of handling big-data, this work enhances the use of Map-Reduce technique to handle big-data distributed on the cloud. This approach was evaluated using Hadoop server and applied on Electroencephalogram (EEG) Big-data as a case study. The proposed approach showed clear enhancement on managing and processing the EEG Big-data with average of 50% reduction on response time. The obtained results provide EEG researchers and specialist with an easy and fast method of handling the EEG big data

Classification improvement of spoken arabic language based on radial basis function

The important task in the computer interaction is the languages recognition and classification. In the Arab world, there is a persistent need for the Arabic spoken language recognition To help those who have lost the upper parties in doing what they want through speech computer interaction. While, the Arabic automatic speech recognition (AASR) did not receive the desired attention from the researchers. In this paper, the Radial Basis Function(RBF) is used for the improvement of the Arabic spoken language letter. The recognition and classification process are based on three steps; these are; preprocessing, feature extraction and classification (Recognition). The Arabic  Language Letters  (ALL) recognition is done by using the combination between the statistical features and the Temporal Radial Basis Function for different letter situation and noisy condition. The recognition percent are from 90% - 99.375% has been gained with independent speaker, where these results are over-perform the earlier works by nearly 2.045%. The simulati.on has been made by using Matlab 2015b

Spectroscopic Study of Copper Plasma Produced by Fundamental Nd: YAG Laser by LIBS

Background:     The effect of laser wavelength on the analytical results obtained from LIBS by Nd: YAG laser diagnostics to copper element is experimentally investigated by Nd: YAG laser at 1064 nm wavelength. The temperature and density of electrons in copper plasma are calculated under (LTE) conditions. Materials and Methods: Various copper transitions were obtained. Identification of transition lines from the spectrum is carried out by comparing spectral lines with NIST atomic database. The results after performing the analysis were compared with (NIST) database. Results:  The result showed that the various wavelengths obtained from the copper target tare with significant compatibility with the same wavelengths from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Conclusion:  LIBS technique proved to be a precise and accurate tool for calculating electron temperature and electron number density, the presence of different elements with very low tolerance, and diagnosing their concentrations. &nbsp

Fusion Landsat-8 Thermal TIRS and OLI Datasets for Superior Monitoring and Change Detection using Remote Sensing

Currently, updating the change detection (CD) of land use/land cover (LU/LC) geospatial information with high accuracy outcomes is important and very confusing with the different classification methods, datasets, satellite images, and ancillary dataset types available. However, using just the low spatial resolution visible bands of the remotely sensed images will not provide good information with high accuracy. Remotely sensed thermal data contains very valuable information to monitor and investigate the CD of the LU/LC. So, it needs to involve the thermal datasets for better outcomes. Fusion plays a big role to map the CD. Therefore, this study aims to find out a refining method for estimating the accurate CD method of the LU/LC patterns by investigating the integration of the effectiveness of the thermal satellite data with visible datasets by (a) adopting a noise removal model, (b) satellite images resampling, (c) image fusion, combining and integrating between the visible and thermal images using the Grim Schmidt spectral (GS) method, (d) applying image classification using Mahalanobis distances (MH), Maximum likelihood (ML) and artificial neural network (ANN) classifiers on datasets captured from the Landsat-8 TIRS and OLI satellite system, these images were captured from operational land imager (OLI) and the thermal infrared (TIRS) sensors of 2015 and 2020 to generate about of twelve LC maps. (e) The comparison was made among all the twelve classifiers' results. The results reveal that adopting the ANN technique on the integrated images of the combined TIRS and OLI datasets has the highest accuracy compared to the rest of the applied image classification approaches. The obtained overall accuracy was 96.31% and 98.40%, and the kappa coefficients were (0.94) and (0.97) for the years 2015 and 2020, respectively. However, the ML classifier obtains better results compared to the MH approach. The image fusion and integration of the thermal images improve the accuracy results by 5%–6% from the proposed method better than using low spatial-resolution visible datasets alone. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-07-02-09 Full Text: PD

Prediction of Hourly Cooling Energy Consumption of Educational Buildings Using Artificial Neural Network

Predicating the required building energy when it is in the design stage and before being constructed considers a crucial step for in charge people. Hence, the main aim of this research is to accurately forecast the needed building cooling energy per hour for educational buildings at University of Technology in Iraq. For this purpose, the feed forward artificial neural network (ANN) has been selected as an efficient technique to develop such a predication system.  Firstly, the main building parameters have been investigated and then only the most important ones were chosen to be used as inputs to the ANN model. However, due to the long time period that is required to collect actual consumed building energy in order to be employed for ANN model training, the hourly analysis program (HAP), which is a building simulation software, has been utilized to produce a database covering the summer months in Iraq. Different training algorithms and range of learning rate values have been investigated, and the Bayesian regularization backpropagation training algorithm and 0.05 learning rate were found very suitable for precise cooling energy prediction. To evaluate the performance of the optimized ANN model, mean square error (MSE) and correlation coefficient (R) have been adopted. The MSE and R indices for the predication results proved that the optimized ANN model is having a high predication accuracy with 5.99*10-6 and 0.9994, respectively

IL-17 level in patients with acute myocardial infarction and its effect on lipid profile

Myocardial infarction (MI) is considered as the major cause of death and disability worldwide, and despite considerable advances in diagnosis and treatment, continues to be a major public health problem. Interleukin-17 (IL-17) is leukocyte-derived cytokine with effects especially on epithelial cells in various tissues. This study designed to investigate the level of IL-17 and its effect on lipid profile in patients with Acute Myocardial Infarction. The study included 50 patients with acute myocardial infarction forty healthy subjects as control group. The levels of IL-17 were significantly elevated in all patients groups (p < 0.001), total cholesterol, LDL, VLDL were significantly elevated (p < 0.001) in all patients as well.  There was positive correlation between IL-17 with HDL, while there was negative correlation with total cholesterol and LDL. The results show significant increase in levels of IL-17, in acute myocardial infarction patients. IL-17 positively correlated with HDL and negatively correlated with total cholesterol and LDL, which lead to consider it as cardio protective factor

Analysis of a framework implementation of the transceiver performances for integrating optical technologies and wireless LAN based on OFDM-RoF

The greatest advantages of optical fibers are the possibility of extending data rate transmission and propagation distances. Being a multi-carrier technique, the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) can be applicable in hybrid optical-wireless systems design owing to its best spectral efficiency for the interferences of radio frequency (RF) and minor multi-path distortion. An optical OFDM-RoF-based wireless local area network (W-LAN) system has been studied and evaluated in this work. The outline for integrating an optical technology and wireless in a single system was provided with the existence of OFDM-RoF technology and the microstrip patch antenna; these were applied in the Optisystem communication tool. The design of the proposed OFDM-RoF system is aimed at supporting mm-wave services and multi-standard operations. The proposed system can operate on different RF bands using different modulation schemes like 4,16 and 64QAM, that may be associated to OFDM and multidata rates up to 5 Gbps. The results demonstrate the robustness of the integrated optical wireless link in propagating OFDM-RoF-based WLAN signals across optical fibers