Journal of Engineering

The design of safe pedestrian facilities usually depends on the assessment of pedestrian characteristics and behavior. In this investigation, pedestrian walking speed through the religious occasion have been monitored at three locations, Al- Kadhimiya (Imam AL-Kadim), Najaf and Karbala (Imam AL-Husain) holy shrines. Video captures of the pedestrian through their walking to the two holy shrines have been prepared and analyzed for walking speed, gender, age groups, and clothing tradition. The pedestrian sample size is 468, 501, and 447 for Al- Kadhimiya, Karbala, and Najaf respectively. When the gender is taken into consideration, it can be noted that the walking speed of male and female pedestrian is (0.97, 1.68, and 1.63) and (0.82, 1.46, and 1.48) meter/second for Al- Kadhimiya, Karbala, and Najaf respectively. When the cloth tradition is considered, female pedestrian wearing Arabic style is slower than male by 9% for Karbala and Najaf and 3% for Al- Kadhimiya. On the other hand, when age groups are considered, the elder pedestrian is slower in walking by 6% regardless of the gender and location. It was recommended that the restricted walking path at Al- Kadhimiya could be improved to control the jam density of pedestrian and increase the walking speed to its standard limit.

Due to the deliberate disposal of industrial waste, a great amount of petroleum hydrocarbons pollute the soil and aquatic environments. Bioremediation that depends on the microorganisms in the removal of pollutants is more efficient and cost-effective technology. In this study, five rhizobacteria were isolated from Phragmites australis roots and exposed to real wastewater from Al-Daura refinery with 70 mg/L total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) concentration. The five selected rhizobacteria were examined in a biodegradation test for seven days to remove TPH. The results showed that 80% TPH degradation as the maximum value by Sphingomonas Paucimobilis as identified with Vitek® 2 Compact (France).

Cadmium is one of the heavy metal found in the wastewater of many industries. The electrocoagulation offers many advantages for the removal of cadmium over other methods. So the removal of cadmium from wastewater by using electrocoagulation was studied to investigate the effect of operating parameters on the removal efficiency. The studied parameters were the initial pH, initial concentration, and applied voltage. The study experiments were conducted in a batch reactor with (10×10×15) ???????? with two pairs of aluminum electrodes with dimension (8×8) ???????? and 2mm in thick with 1.5 cm space between them. The optimum removal was obtained at pH =7, initial concentration = 50 mg/L, and applied voltage = 20 V and it was 90%.
Keywords: Electrocoagulation, cadmium, wastewater.

Electrospinning is a novel technique that can be used to produce highly porous fibers with highly tunable properties. In this research, this technique is adopted to prepare the electrospun nanofiber membrane for membrane distillation application. A custom-built electrospinning setup was made to prepare the nanofibers membrane. Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymer was used in the electrospinning process due to its high hydrophobicity. Electrospun (PVDF) nanofibers were tested in direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) process using 0.6 M sodium chloride as a feed solution. The resulting nanofiber membrane exhibited high performance in DCMD (i.e. relatively high water flux and high salt rejection). It has been found that the prepared membrane has a uniform and fibrous structure as indicated by the scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Relatively thin fibers with a diameter of 250 nm were produced during the Electrospinning process.

Euphrates River extends about 125 km within the study area located in Annassiriyah City, Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq. The impact of the seven hydraulic structures on the discharge capacity of the Euphrates River needs to be considered. The main objectives of this research are to increase the discharge capacity of Euphrates River within Annassiriyah City during flood seasons and study the impact of these hydraulic structures on the river capacity by using HEC-RAS 5.0.3 software. Five scenarios were simulated to study the different current condition of Euphrates River within Annassiriyah City. Other additional four scenarios were implemented through river training to increase the river capacity to 1300 m³/s; it is the flood of 100 year return period. The results of the current condition showed that the maximum discharge capacity of Euphrates River within Annassiriyah City is just 300 m³/s. The results of applied improvements show that the capacity can reach 1300 m³/s when Al Chibayish Weir was hypothetically removed from the river system. Additionally, the river capacity will be reduced to 600 m³/s when Al Chibayish Weir is considered. It was concluded that the 100-year flood discharge cannot be achieved without removing Al Chibayish Weir from the river system.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of total suspended solids (TSS) on the performance of a continuously operated dual-chamber microbial fuel cell (MFC) proceeded by primary clarifier to treat actual potato chips processing wastewater. The system was also tested in the absence of the primary clarifier and the results demonstrated a significant effect of TSS on the polarization curve of the MFC which was obtained by operating the graphite anodic electrode against Ag/AgCl reference electrode. The maximum observed power and current densities were decreased form 102.42 mW/m2 and 447.26 mA/m2 to 80.16 mW/m2 and 299.10 mA/m2, respectively due to the adverse effect of TSS. Also, the internal resistance increased from 40 to 70Ω.

Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is one of the developed techniques for relief representation. The definition of a DEM construction is the modeling technique of earth surface from existing data. DEM plays a role as one of the fundamental information requirement that has been generally utilized in GIS data structures. The main aim of this research is to present a methodology for assessing DEMs generation methods. The DEMs data will be extracted from open source data e.g. Google Earth. The tested data will be compared with data produced from formal institutions such as General Directorate of Surveying. The study area has been chosen in south of Iraq (Al-Gharraf / Dhi Qar governorate. The methods of DEMs creation are kriging, IDW (inverse distance weight), spline, and natural neighbor. This research used different software for processing and analysis such as ArcGIS 10.2, TCX and Civil 3D. Two- sample t-test has been adopted to investigate the mean of elevation differences between compared datasets. The results showed that the spline is the best method that can be used to build DEM in this study area.

In this paper, an Anti-Disturbance Compensator is suggested for the stabilization of a 6-DoF quadrotor Unmanned Aerial vehicle (UAV) system, namely, the Improved Active Disturbance Rejection Control (IADRC). The proposed Control Scheme rejects the disturbances subjected to this system and eliminates the effect of the uncertainties that the quadrotor system exhibits. The complete nonlinear mathematical model of the 6-DoF quadrotor UAV system has been used to design the four ADRCs units for the attitude and altitude stabilization. Stability analysis has been demonstrated for the Linear Extended State Observer (LESO) of each IADRC unit and the overall closed-loop system using Hurwitz stability criterion. A minimization to a proposed multi-objective Output Performance Index (OPI) is achieved in the MATLAB environment to tune the IADRCs parameters using Genetic Algorithm (GA). The IADRC has been tested for the 6-DOF quadrotor under different tracking scenarios, including disturbance rejection and uncertainties elimination and compared with nonlinear and linear PID controllers. The simulations showed the excellent performance of the proposed compensator against the controllers used in the comparison.

The software-defined network (SDN) is a new technology that separates the control plane from data plane for the network devices. One of the most significant issues in the video surveillance system is the link failure. When the path failure occurs, the monitoring center cannot receive the video from the cameras. In this paper, two methods are proposed to solve this problem. The first method uses the Dijkstra algorithm to re-find the path at the source node switch. The second method uses the Dijkstra algorithm to re-find the path at the ingress node switch (or failed link). Based on simulation results, it is concluded that the second method consumes less time (lower transmission delay) than the first method. The delay consumed by the second method is half the delay in the first method. Also, the packet loss rate for second method is 14%, while 16% in the first method. The jitter for second method is almost similar to the jitter without link fail. Therefore, the second method led to select the path with small losses without impact on video quality. Finally, the results of two methods are compared in terms of end to end delay, packet loss rate, and jitter.

This paper aims to evaluate the reliability analysis for steel beam which represented by the probability of Failure and reliability index. Monte Carlo Simulation Method (MCSM) and First Order Reliability Method (FORM) will be used to achieve this issue. These methods need two samples for each behavior that want to study; the first sample for resistance (carrying capacity R), and second for load effect (Q) which are parameters for a limit state function. Monte Carlo method has been adopted to generate these samples dependent on the randomness and uncertainties in variables. The variables that consider are beam cross-section dimensions, material property, beam length, yield stress, and applied loads. Matlab software has been adopted to generate these pseudo-random variables dependent on its statistical characteristics such as coefficient of variance and probability density function that gathered from a review of literatures.

Constructing a fine 3D geomodel for complex giant reservoir is a crucial task for hydrocarbon volume assessment and guiding for optimal development. The case under study is Mishrif reservoir of Halfaya oil field, which is an Iraqi giant carbonate reservoir. Mishrif mainly consists of limestone rocks which belong to Late Cenomanian age. The average gross thickness of formation is about 400m. In this paper, a high-resolution 3D geological model has been built using Petrel software that can be utilized as input for dynamic simulation. The model is constructed based on geological, geophysical, pertophysical and engineering data from about 60 available wells to characterize the structural, stratigraphic, and properties distribution along the reservoir. Fourteen geological surfaces for all Mishrif units have been generated based on well tops data and top Mishrif structural map. The reservoir has been divided into 163 sublayers through the vertical direction and 160*383 grid cells in x-y direction with 9,988,640 total grid cells. A scale up process are performed for well log data, then, Sequential Gaussian Simulation algorithm are applied to fill 3D grid cells with properties values in areas away from wells. Pertophysical properties distribution for all reservoir zones are analyzed. The estimated initial oil in place of Mishrif through this model is close to that calculated in other previous studies.

This study investigates the implementation of Taguchi design in the estimation of minimum corrosion rate of mild-steel in cooling tower that uses saline solution of different concentration. The experiments were set on the basis of Taguchi’s L16 orthogonal array. The runs were carried out under different condition such as inlet concentration of saline solution, temperature, and flowrate. The Signal-to- Noise ratio and ANOVA analysis were used to define the impact of cooling tower working conditions on the corrosion rate. A regression had been modelled and optimized to identify the optimum level for the working parameters that had been founded to be 13%NaCl, 35ᴼC, and 1 l/min. Also a confirmation run to establish the precision of the Taguchi design for optimization the corrosion rate in cooling tower with high reliability. The contour plot had been applied to understand how it can be in finding the relation between the corrosion rate and the working parameters of the cooling tower.

The operation and management of water resources projects have direct and significant effects on the optimum use of water. Artificial intelligence techniques are a new tool used to help in making optimized decisions, based on knowledge bases in the planning, implementation, operation and management of projects as well as controlling flowing water quantities to prevent flooding and storage of excess water and use it during drought.
In this research, an Expert System was designed for operating and managing the system of AthTharthar Lake (ESSTAR). It was applied for all expected conditions of flow, including the cases of drought, normal flow, and during floods. Moreover, the cases of hypothetical operating of flow under extreme conditions were considered. The results showed a good capability of the designed expert system to operate the potential cases for those discharges and with high efficiency. Also the results showed the inability of AthTharthar Lake System to pass the discharge up to 12600 m3/s during floods. It was recommended to accomplish Tigris River training and increasing the level of levees, reshaping the cross-sections and longitudinal section of the river. It was suggested to expanded AthTharthar Head Regulator and the intake canal to accommodate more flood discharges.