In this work, a novel design for the NiO/TiO2 heterojunction solar cells is presented. Highly-pure nanopowders prepared by dc reactive magnetron sputtering technique were used to form the heterojunctions. The electrical characteristics of the proposed design were compared to those of a conventional thin film heterojunction design prepared by the same technique. A higher efficiency of 300% was achieved by the proposed design. This attempt can be considered as the first to fabricate solar cells from highly-pure nanopowders of two different semiconductors.

A new, Simple, sensitive and accurate spectrophotometric methods have been developed for the determination of sulfamethoxazole (SMZ) drug in pure and dosage forms. This method based on the reaction of sulfamethoxazole (SMZ) with 1,2-napthoquinone-4-sulphonic acid (NQS) to form Nalkylamono naphthoquinone by replacement of the sulphonate group of the naphthoquinone sulphonic acid by an amino group. The colored chromogen shows absorption maximum at 460 nm. The optimum conditions of condensation reaction forms were investigated by (1) univariable method, by optimizing the effect of experimental variables (different bases, reagent concentration, borax concentration and reaction time), (2) central composite design (CCD) including the effect of

Static loads exposing to mechanical components can cause cracks, which are lead to form stress concentration regions causing the failure of structure. Generally, from 80% to 90% of structure failure is due to initiation of the cracks. Therefore, it is necessary to repair the crack and reduce its effect on the structure where the effect of the crack is modelled as an additional flexibility to the structure. In the last few years, piezoelectric materials have been considered as one of the most favourable repairing techniques. The piezoelectric material converts the applied voltage on it to a bending moment to counter the bending moment caused by the external load on the beam at the crack location. In this study, the design of the piez

This paper presents a hybrid energy resources (HER) system consisting of solar PV, storage, and utility grid. It is a challenge in real time to extract maximum power point (MPP) from the PV solar under variations of the irradiance strength.  This work addresses challenges in identifying global MPP, dynamic algorithm behavior, tracking speed, adaptability to changing conditions, and accuracy. Shallow Neural Networks using the deep learning NARMA-L2 controller have been proposed. It is modeled to predict the reference voltage under different irradiance. The dynamic PV solar and nonlinearity have been trained to track the maximum power drawn from the PV solar systems in real time.

Moreover, the proposed controller i

The work includes synthesis and characterization of some new heterocyclic compounds, as flow: The compound (3) (5-(4-chlorophenyl) -2-hydrazinyl-1,3,4-oxadiazole was synthesized by using two methods; the first method includes the direct reaction between hydrazine hydrate 80% and 5-(4-chlorophenyl)-2- (ethylthio) 1,3,4-oxadiazole (1), the second method involves converting 5-(4-chlorophenyl)-1,3,4-oxadiazol-2-amine (2) to diazonium salt then reducing this salt to compound (3) by stannous chloride. Compound (3) was used as starting material for synthesizing several fused heterocyclic compounds. The compound 6-(4- chlorophenyl)[1,2.4] triazolo [3,4,b][1,3,4] oxadiazole-3-(2H) thione (compound 4) was synthesized from the reaction of compo

Peak ground acceleration (PGA) is one of the critical factors that affect the determination of earthquake intensity. PGA is generally utilized to describe ground motion in a particular zone and is able to efficiently predict the parameters of site ground motion for the design of engineering structures. Therefore, novel models are developed to forecast PGA in the case of the Iraqi database, which utilizes the particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach. A data set of 187 historical ground-motion recordings in Iraq’s tectonic regions was used to build the explicit proposed models. The proposed PGA models relate to different seismic parameters, including the magnitude of the earthquake (Mw), average shear-wave velocity (VS30), focal depth (FD

Correct grading of apple slices can help ensure quality and improve the marketability of the final product, which can impact the overall development of the apple slice industry post-harvest. The study intends to employ the convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures of ResNet-18 and DenseNet-201 and classical machine learning (ML) classifiers such as Wide Neural Networks (WNN), Naïve Bayes (NB), and two kernels of support vector machines (SVM) to classify apple slices into different hardness classes based on their RGB values. Our research data showed that the DenseNet-201 features classified by the SVM-Cubic kernel had the highest accuracy and lowest standard deviation (SD) among all the methods we tested, at 89.51 %  1.66 %. This

Because of the quick growth of electrical instruments used in noxious gas detection, the importance of gas sensors has increased. X-ray diffraction (XRD) can be used to examine the crystal phase structure of sensing materials, which affects the properties of gas sensing. This contributes to the study of the effect of electrochemical synthesis of titanium dioxide (TiO₂) materials with various crystal phase shapes, such as rutile TiO₂ (R-TiO₂NTs) and anatase TiO₂ (A-TiO₂NTs). In this work, we have studied the effect of voltage on preparing TiO₂ nanotube arrays via the anodization technique for gas sensor applications. The results acquired from XRD, energy dispersion spectro