The concrete industry consumes millions of tons of aggregate comprising of natural sands and gravels, each year. In recent years there has been an increasing trend towards using recycled aggregate to save natural resources and to produce lightweight concrete. This study investigates the possibility of using waste plastic as one of the components of lead-acid batteries to replace the fine aggregate by 50 and 70% by volume of concrete masonry units. Compared to the reference concrete mix, results demonstrated that a reduction of approximately 32.5% to 39.6% in the density for replacement of 50% to 70% respectively. At 28 days curing age, the compressive strength was decreased while the water absorption increased by increas

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).

In this investigation, Rayleigh–Ritz method is used to calculate the natural frequencies of rectangular isotropic and laminated symmetric and anti-symmetric cross and angle ply composite plate with general elastic supports along its edges. Each of the admissible functions here is composed of a trigonometric function and an arbitrary continuous function that is introduced to ensure the sufficient smoothness of the so-called residual displacement function at the edges. Perhaps more importantly, this study has developed a general approach for deriving a complete set of admissible functions that can be applied to various boundary conditions. Several numerical examples are studied to demonstrate the accuracy and convergence of the current s

Coffee bean contains bioactive compounds including caffeine and chlorogenic acid (CGA) that have a stimulant effect and are used for combating fatigue and drowsiness, and enhancing alertness. However, when the coffee bean was processed in the form of green coffee bean (GCB) extract, it has an unpleasant flavour and limitations instability, activity, and bioavailability. This study aimed to produce microcapsules of the GCB (Coffea canephora) ethanolic extract containing considerable amounts of the bioactive compounds for nutraceutical supplements. The GCB ethanolic extract was microencapsulated by spray drying using a whey protein concentrate (WPC) biopolimer. The particle size (PSA), morphology (SEM), and physicochemical charact

        In this work, an anti-reflection coating was prepared in the region (400-1000) nm of wavelength, with a double layer of silicon dioxide (SiO₂) as an inner layer and the second layer of the mixture (SiO₂) and titanium dioxide (TiO₂) with certain ratios, as an outer layer using the chemical spraying method with a number of 6 sprays of layer SiO₂ and 12 sprays of layer SiO₂ - TiO₂. Using the method of chemical spraying deposited on the glass as a substrate with a different number of sprays of SiO₂, and a fixed number of TiO₂-SiO₂. The optical and structural properties were determined using UV-Vis spectroscopy and atomic force mi

Mutans streptococci (MS) are a group of oral bacteria considered as the main cariogenic organisms. MS consists of several species of genus Streptococcus which are sharing similar phenotypes and genotypes. The aim of this study is to determine the genetic diversity of the core species of clinical strains of Streptococcus mutans, Streptococcus sobrinus and Streptococcus downei by using repitative extragenic palindromic (REP) primer. The DNA of the clinical strains of S. mutans (n=10), S. sobrinus (n=05) and S. downei (n=04) have been employed in the present study, which have been previously isolated from caries active subjects. The DNA of the clinical and reference strains was

The inhibitory effect of acetone, ethanol, and aqueous extracts of ten medicinal plants on β-lactamase from Staphylococcus sciuri and Klebsiella pneumoniae was investigated in vitro by starch-iodine agar plate method. The results revealed the success of starch-iodine method for the detection of the inhibition of β-lactamase activity by the various extracts of each individual plant. The acetone extracts of Catharanthus roseus, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, and Schinus terebinthifolius induced an inhibitory effect on β-lactamase from Staphylococcus sciuri. On the other hand, acetone extracts from only Eucalyptus camaldulensis, and Schinus

Data-driven models perform poorly on part-of-speech tagging problems with the square Hmong language, a low-resource corpus. This paper designs a weight evaluation function to reduce the influence of unknown words. It proposes an improved harmony search algorithm utilizing the roulette and local evaluation strategies for handling the square Hmong part-of-speech tagging problem. The experiment shows that the average accuracy of the proposed model is 6%, 8% more than HMM and BiLSTM-CRF models, respectively. Meanwhile, the average F1 of the proposed model is also 6%, 3% more than HMM and BiLSTM-CRF models, respectively.

In this work, the extraction of glycyrrhizin from Licorice using bulk liquid membrane technique was developed and optimized. The effect of various parameters such as pH of stripping and donor solutions, temperature, stirring speed and kinetic parameters were investigated. Moreover, to study the impact of the polarity of membrane solvent, two types of extraction solvents were used as a membrane solvent: n-Hexane was used as a non-polar solvent and 1-Hexanol was as a polar solvent. The optimum extraction condition was found (95.53%) using 1-Hexanol, rotating speed was 400 rpm, and pH of the acceptor and donor solutions were 8 and 5.5, respectively. The reaction kinetics constants ( and ) for the transport of glycyrrhizin from the donor pha