The increasing demand for energy has encouraged the development of renewable resources and environmentally benign fuel such as biodiesel. In this study, ethyl fatty esters (EFEs), a major component of biodiesel fuel, were synthesized from soybean oil using sodium ethoxide as a catalyst. By-products were glycerol and difatty acyl urea (DFAU), which has biological characteristics, as antibiotics and antifungal medications. Both EFEs and DFAU have been characterized using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technique. The optimum conditions were studied as a function of reaction time, reactant molar ratios, catalyst percentage and the effect of organic solvents. The conversion ratio of soybea

     Binary relations or interactions among bio-entities, such as proteins, set up the essential part of any living biological system. Protein-protein interactions are usually structured in a graph data structure called "protein-protein interaction networks" (PPINs). Analysis of PPINs into complexes tries to lay out the significant knowledge needed to answer many unresolved questions, including how cells are organized and how proteins work. However, complex detection problems fall under the category of non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-Hard) problems due to their computational complexity. To accommodate such combinatorial explosions, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are proven effective alternatives to heuristics in solvin

Leap Motion Controller (LMC) is a gesture sensor consists of three infrared light emitters and two infrared stereo cameras as tracking sensors. LMC translates hand movements into graphical data that are used in a variety of applications such as virtual/augmented reality and object movements control. In this work, we intend to control the movements of a prosthetic hand via (LMC) in which fingers are flexed or extended in response to hand movements. This will be carried out by passing in the data from the Leap Motion to a processing unit that processes the raw data by an open-source package (Processing i3) in order to control five servo motors using a micro-controller board. In addition, haptic setup is proposed using force sensors (F

In general, path-planning problem is one of most important task in the field of robotics. This paper describes the path-planning problem of mobile robot based on various metaheuristic algorithms. The suitable collision free path of a robot must satisfies certain optimization criteria such as feasibility, minimum path length, safety and smoothness and so on. In this research, various three approaches namely, PSO, Firefly and proposed hybrid FFCPSO are applied in static, known environment to solve the global path-planning problem in three cases. The first case used single mobile robot, the second case used three independent mobile robots and the third case applied three follow up mobile robot.  Simulation results, whi

Polyacrylonitrile nanofiber (PANFS), a well-known polymers, has been extensively employed in the manufacturing of carbon nanofibers (CNFS), which have recently gained substantial attention due to their excellent features, such as spinnability, environmental friendliness, and commercial feasibility. Because of their high carbon yield and versatility in tailoring the final CNFS structure, In addition to the simple formation of ladder structures through nitrile polymerization to yield stable products, CNFS and PAN have been the focus of extensive research as potential production precursors. For instance, the development of biomedical and high-performance composites has now become achievable. PAN homopolymer or PAN-based precursor copol

Computations of the relative permeability curves were made through their representation by two functions for wetting and nonwetting phases. Each function contains one parameter that controls the shape of the relative permeability curves. The values of these parameters are chosen to minimize an objective function, that is represented as a weighted sum of the squared differences between experimentally measured data and the corresponding data calculated by a mathematical model simulating the experiment. These data comprise the pressure drop across core samples and the recovery response of the displacing phase. Two mathematical models are constructed in this study to simulate incompressible, one-dimensional, two-phase flow. The first model d

Breast cancer constitutes about one fourth of the registered cancer cases among the Iraqi population (1)
and it is the leading cause of death among Iraqi women (2)
. Each year more women are exposed to the vicious
ramifications of this disease which include death if left unmanaged or the negative sequels that they would
experience, cosmetically and psychologically, after exposure to radical mastectomy.
The World Health Organization (WHO) documented that early detection and screening, when coped
with adequate therapy, could offer a reduction in breast cancer mortality; displaying that the low survival rates
in less developed countries, including Iraq, is mainly attributed to the lack of early detection programs couple