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Go to Editorial ManagerIn several countries, residential buildings are responsible for high energy consumption. The majority of energy is consumed on air conditioning to ensure maximum indoor comfort. In Iraq, the demand for electricity increases significantly, especially during the summer for cooling purposes. In this paper, two technologies are proposed for buildings to reduce the cooling load. These approaches included the use of phase- changing materials (PCM) in different locations in the walls and roof, in addition to roof shading by galvanized iron. The effects of these proposals were simulated in the latest software tool (designbuilder) and compared with the standard building model. The results were clear when PCM was installed on the outer surface of the wall and roof, which achieved the highest reduction in the cooling load of about 18 %. While the roof shading method using corrugated galvanized iron proved its effectiveness by decreasing the cooling load to 5 % compared to the standard case.
Concerning commercial and residential buildings, one of the major parts related to water supply systems is the water storage tanks. For gravity- fed buildings, the tanks must be installed on the roof. In Iraqi summer, the temperature of water in storage tanks reaches above 50 °C due to high solar intensity, which makes it inappropriate for domestic usage. One of the proposed solutions to overcome this problem is feeding the hot water into an earth-water heat exchanger (EWHE) which consists of a set of buried pipes installed underground level to reduce its temperature. The storage tank and the earth-water heat exchanger were studied experimentally and theoretically by using ANSYS 20/FLUENT software to estimating the water temperature in the storage tank and the temperature of the water leaving the EWHE. The most important results obtained theoretically and experimentally that when using pipe length, pipe diameter, and mass flow rate of 100 m, 0.016 m, 0.7 LPM respectively, at a depth of 3 m, the water temperature decreases by about 15 °C. Also, the results have shown a good agreement between the experimental and theoretical works. One can conclude that an earth-water heat exchanger is an effective way to decrease the temperature of the storage water to an acceptable level for domestic usages.
An-Najaf Province is one of the most important cities in Iraq and is experiencing rapid population growth and continuous expansion of infrastructure, including residential buildings, hotels, bridges, and commercial centers. This study aims to establish a spatial database of gypsum content in soils across An-Najaf Province, including Najaf city center and Al-Kufa city, to support safe geotechnical design. A total of 464 boreholes and in situ test records were analyzed using Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques to assess the spatial variability of gypsum content. The adopted methodology comprised four main stages: data collection, georeferencing of geotechnical data, application of interpolation methods, and map generation. Nine geotechnical distribution maps were produced for depths of 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, and 35 m. Results indicated that the 0–4 m depth layer is predominantly moderately gypsiferous, with gypsum content ranging between 10–25%. The 4–8 m depth layer is mainly slightly gypsiferous, with values between 3–10%, while deeper layers from 8 to 35 m are very slightly gypsiferous, with contents ranging from 0.3–3%. These findings show that the near-surface layers (0–4 m) exceed the allowable gypsum content limit of 10%, which may pose potential risks to construction stability, particularly in combination with the high groundwater levels in the Najaf region.