Recent Progress in Science and Technology Vol. 8

Diverse human activities, as industrial, agricultural, commercial, and touristic ones have the direct goal to support increasing humanity quality of life. Anyway, it has been remarked that beside positive direct and desired effects of these activities, simultaneously they can have also negative, undesired, and sometimes unthinkable effects on environment and society. For assuring the sustainable development of human society is therefore necessary to assess economic activities not only from economic and technological points of view but also from environmental and social ones. In this context appropriate indicators for economic, environmental, and social aspects must be developed and used. To carry out environmental impact assessments environmental indicators on local and regional level are to be used. General notions regarding environmental indicators will be presented, their usage possibilities as well as application examples from practical situations. Possibilities to define in a modular way environmental indicators will be debated and emphasised. A fuzzy logic-based aggregation method will be presented for a concrete situation of assessing air pollution on regional level, and by this the advantages of using soft computing methods will be pointed out. Obtained results will be debated, and conclusions regarding the usage potential of presented methodology will be drawn.

This study focuses on the Iraqi marshes, specifically the Abu Zarag marsh located in the southern city of Al-Nasiriyah, which is considered the most significant heritage in Iraq. The research is divided into two main parts. The first part involves the evaluation of water quality parameters in Abu Zarag marsh during the flooding season from December 2018 to April 2019. The parameters include Temperature, pH, Electrical Conductivity, Total Dissolved Solids, Alkalinity, Total Hardness, Turbidity, Dissolved Oxygen, Sulfate, and Nitrate. The second part involves comparing the water quality parameters of the recent period with those of the previous years from 2014 to 2019. The research findings are presented using an Arc GIS map. Additionally, the study includes modeling and simulation of flooding during the study period using the Arc GIS-Arc Scene program. The results of the research show that the Iraqi marshes, particularly the Abu Zarag marsh, have been replenished, leading to the recovery of the natural environment in southern Iraq.

In the works of economists, one still encounters the perception of capital as tangible or intangible assets. The understanding of capital stems from the principle of dualism, which is the basis of accounting theory and the measurement of periodic income of economic units. From this principle it follows that capital is an abstract category. In energy-material processes, capital represents the abstract ability to do work.  Thus, mathematics providing abstract tools and thermodynamics capable of describing the transformation of energy and work are used to describe capital. Consideration of the principles of thermodynamics is necessary when measuring periodic profits, asset depreciation and equivalent wages. The consistent application of the second principle of thermodynamics leads to the conclusion that the natural constant revealed in the theory of human capital measurement also determines the rate of passage of time so the triad of capital-labor-time is the foundation of economic knowledge. Theoretical analyses and findings are confirmed by empirical studies.

Fast change trend in customer’s demand determines the type of production. The "high-mix and low volume" production has become the mainstream of production to meet customer’s need. The main problem of high-mix low volume production is significantly increasing the frequency of set up, causing an increase in set-up time for production. For set-up reduction strategies, Shingo proposed a lean manufacturing methodology called Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED). The SMED methodology makes it possible to reduce setup (changeover) operations time significantly. In this study, a cable processing company is used as a study case. The potential of faster setup can be completely achieved with SMED method. Furthermore, an optimized scheduling reference indicator is presented  for the moulding machine that help decision makers to determine the sequencing rule of scheduling by each criterion through the system to improve the performance.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of three different levels of Syrian natural zeolite on the bacterial load concentrations in the air of broilers farms for six weeks. The broiler farms are considered as a reservoir of pathogenic microorganism. This research was carried out  in private commercial broiler farm in the Lattakia Governorate, Syria During spring (from March to April) and autumn (from October to November) seasons. In the experiment, commercial broiler hybrid (Roos 308), with a total number (3000), were randomly assigned to four groups. This experiment was created using complete randomization, and each group (750 birds) has three replicates with 250 birds in each replicate (in addition to the control section). The findings revealed that the concentrations value for Staphylococcus spp. during spring, at the sixth week of the fattening period, in the treatment Tz₃ (75%) was recorded 7.0×10⁵, while in autumn; the value was 7.4×10⁵ CFU/m³. And for Escherichia coli in spring, was 8.4×10³ and in the autumn 8.8×10³ CFU/m³. According to the findings, adding Syrian natural zeolite to broiler litter resulted in a significantly (p<0.05) lower concentration of airborne bacteria at the end of the experiment, with a superior effect to Tz₃ treatment in the internal air, and the lowest concentration was observed in spring compared to autumn. This result serves as a guide for the optimal use of the various ratios of Syrian natural zeolite, as well as the development of new methods for reducing airborne microorganisms in broiler farms.

Digital image processing is an emerging technology and has found vast applications in biomedical imaging, stellar imaging, remote sensing and radar imaging, the study of climatology, seismology, seabed studies and exploration of earth resources. Image segmentation process of any digital image has been found important in the second level of processing and the main aim of this level of processing is to generate and feed the information to the computer machine for subsequent higher level image processing. Morphology based image segmentation has occupied a significant position in state of art image processing and it needs a thorough investigation for the betterment of the subject concerned and for the ease of handling of the massive data by the machines. The present chapter has aimed at to present a thorough and exhaustive literature study on various aspects of segmentation of digital images using morphological approach.

This paper addresses the difficulties and consequences of the luminance calculation method for roadway lighting applications and recommends a novel illuminance calculation method as the best fit for Roadway Lighting Applications. This change would lower the costs of roadway lighting design while increasing safety, benefiting both society and the profession. Luminance calculations are complex, taking approximately five times as long as the new illuminance calculation method, providing no additional insight, and yielding the same design outcome. This paper conducts a comparative study and analyzes both methods using regular comparative analysis, quantitative and qualitative assessments, and offers a solution to the over-50-year-old challenge. The quantitative evaluation uses a sample case study and examines its corresponding benefit-cost ratio. The qualitative approach entails conducting a survey of peers and lighting designers. This is the first paper to address all of the parameters of roadway lighting in a comprehensive manner. This paper will be helpful for academics, researchers, scientists, engineers, consultants, architects, lighting designers, contractors, developers, financial institutions, and government agencies funding outdoor lighting.

Composites are one of the necessities of the current industrial infrastructure due to changing consumer demands. . Aluminum ceramic composites are among the most useful composites in the automotive and aeronautical industries due to their enhanced mechanical and thermal properties. The properties of the composite material, however, are significantly influenced by the amount of reinforcement.  In this study, Al-SiC (Aluminum-Silicon Carbide) metal matrix composite was fabricated using a stir casting method. During the process, parameters such as stirring speed and temperature were kept constant. Sic particles with a mesh size of 200 were used in various proportions. The amount of reinforcement was varied from 0% to 12.5%. The hardness test, microstructure analysis, optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES), and SEM-EDX were used to investigate the effect of the percentage variation of the composite. The OES, microstructure analysis, and SEM-EDX results show that SiC is retained in pure aluminum. The SEM-EDX of the composite with the 7.5% SiC addition shows 5.94% SiC retention, indicating a 79% process efficiency. Furthermore, the hardness analysis revealed that increasing the percentage of SiC increases hardness. Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES) and EDS outcomes show the presence of iron [Fe] from stirrer blade material.

This paper seeks to assess the performance of the healthcare system in Yemen pre- and during-conflict 2010-2020 and to examine the impact of the conflict on the healthcare system performance during the period 2015-2020. Yemen's prolonged war has ravaged its energy system. Fighting, underfunding, and diesel shortages have wreaked havoc on the nation's underdeveloped power grid and left communities and cities without electricity Yemen is facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world due to the ongoing conflict that has begun in 2013. A literature review from 2010 to 2020 of the evidence reported by international and local organizations as well as in published and unpublished articles and reports. The study used the Building Blocks framework developed by the WHO (2007; 2009) (hereafter WHO-BB). According to the findings before the war, Yemen's healthcare system was plagued by governance issues and corruption, a significant funding gap in the healthcare sector, an uneven distribution of healthcare workers, lax pharmaceutical regulations, and inadequate health information. Additionally, the effects of war on the healthcare system were catastrophic. Yemen's healthcare system is ineffective and disjointed. The government needs to restructure the domestic healthcare industry with the assistance of global health organisations in order to resolve this problem.

Three different single mode or multimode fiber cables are available: RC (Russia-Canada), LC (London-Canada), and SC (Singapore-Canada), all of which will be originated from the main optical fiber cable's TJ box (fiber joining box) and in general they can be at most 3456 core. The RC, LC, or SC cable will be connected to the Media converter and a UTP cable will be released from the Media converter and will be connected to any port of a switch to activate the network channel for passing bandwidth through the line. Now, our first concern is to reduce packet loss across the entire channel by using a switch with Gigabit SFP (Small Form-Factor Pluggable) module instead of using a media converter with or without SFP module, and our second concern is to reduce packet loss by using SAN (Storage area network) switch with HBA (Host bus adapter) card to delivery more than or equal100 MBPS bandwidth.

Solderless assembly for electronics is a new paradigm aimed to solve the problems resulting from contradictory contemporary trends: the ban of the lead by the EU RoHS Directive led to an increase of the energy consumption and cost of the electronic products, but to a degradation of reliability; hence, an increase in wastes that comes in contradiction with the depletion of materials for the electronics industry. The increase in demand for electronic products due to an expanding IoT industry requires increased reliability. In a particular approach that tried to be both simple, i.e. using mostly existing electronic assembly line equipment, and disruptive, i.e. manufacturing the entire assembled electronic module in one location, it turned out that new materials were needed. Another electrically conductive substance is needed to avoid the electrochemical process of copper deposition. The paper describes the findings of a study on two electrically conductive composite materials, as well as a method for qualifying them for use in the production of solderless electronic modules capable of handling ultra high-frequency and microwave signals. A practical solution is to compare the frequency behavior of two identical test structures, one made by the electrically conductive composite material, and the other by copper. The comparative analysis revealed that electrically conductive adhesives perform slightly better at high frequencies than copper in terms of insertion loss and return loss in the range of 0 to 10 GHz; the adhesive is a good substitute for solder alloy to connect temperature-sensitive components operating at high frequency.