Fabrication of porous clay refractory insulating specimens from Iraqi kaolin with different percentage of Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) waste crumbs additions were investigated. After mixing and forming by hand molding, the specimens was dried and fired at 1300 oC. The structural, physical, mechanical and thermal properties of the refractory insulating products were measured. Maximum addition of EPS (1.25 wt%) lead to reduce the linear shrinkage to less than 1.7% and increased apparent porosity up to 50 %. As well as, the density, Modulus of rupture and thermal conductivity were reduced to 1.39 g/cm3, 4.1 MPa and 0.21 W/m.K, respectively. The final outcome, addition of EPS showed good results in the formation of pores without distorting the

The calculation of the oil density is more complex due to a wide range of pressuresand temperatures, which are always determined by specific conditions, pressure andtemperature. Therefore, the calculations that depend on oil components are moreaccurate and easier in finding such kind of requirements. The analyses of twenty liveoil samples are utilized. The three parameters Peng Robinson equation of state istuned to get match between measured and calculated oil viscosity. The Lohrenz-Bray-Clark (LBC) viscosity calculation technique is adopted to calculate the viscosity of oilfrom the given composition, pressure and temperature for 20 samples. The tunedequation of state is used to generate oil viscosity values for a range of temperatu

Flexure members such as reinforced concrete (RC) simply supported beams subjected to two-point loading were analyzed numerically. The Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM) was employed for the treatment the non-smooth h behaviour such as discontinuities and singularities. This method is a powerful technique used for the analysis of the fracture process and crack propagation in concrete. Concrete is a heterogeneous material that consists of coarse aggregate, cement mortar and air voids distributed in the cement paste. Numerical modeling of concrete comprises a two-scale model, using mesoscale and macroscale numerical models. The effectiveness and validity of the Meso-Scale Approach (MSA) in modeling of the reinforced concrete beams w

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.

This study presents experimental and numerical investigations on seven one-way, reinforced concrete (RC) slabs with a new technique of slab weight reduction using polystyrene-embedded arched blocks (PEABs). All slabs had the same dimensions, steel reinforcement, and concrete compressive strength. One of these slabs was a solid slab, which was taken as a control slab, while the other six slabs were cast with PEABs. The main variables were the ratio of the length of the PEABs to the length of the slab (lp/L) and the ratio of the height of the PEABs to the total slab depth (hP/H). The minimum decrease in the ultimate load capacity was about 6% with a minimum reduction in the slab weight of 15%. In contrast, the maximum decrease in the

 Inflammatory bowel disease includes both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is a chronic, progressive relapsing disease of gastrointestinal tract that require long-term treatment or maintenance therapy. Taking patient’s beliefs about the prescribed medication in consideration had been shown to be an important factor that affects compliance of the patient in whom having positive beliefs is a prerequisite for better compliance. The aim of the current study was to investigate and assess beliefs about medicines among a sample of Iraqi patients with inflammatory bowel disease and to determine possible association between these beliefs and some patient-specific factors.

This study is a cross-sectional study carried out o

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).

Endophytic bacteria produced analogous secondary metabolites of their hosts. Similarly, the ability to generate antioxidants is not an exception. Dragon scales (Pyrrosia piloselloides), an epiphytic plant of the Polypodiaceae family, are frequently overlooked. This research aims to isolate antioxidant-producing bacteria from dragon-scale fern leaves. The antioxidant activities were tested after the extraction procedure using ethanolic extract. Bacteria were characterized and selected as candidates for antioxidant production by screening for the production of total phenolic compounds. Antioxidant levels were determined utilizing the ABTS, FRAP, and DPPH techniques. The preliminary findings of the entire phenolic compound test rev

The analysis of rigid pavements is a complex mission for many reasons. First, the loading conditions include the repetition of parts of the applied loads (cyclic loads), which produce fatigue in the pavement materials. Additionally, the climatic conditions reveal an important role in the performance of the pavement since the expansion or contraction induced by temperature differences may significantly change the supporting conditions of the pavement. There is an extra difficulty because the pavement structure is made of completely different materials, such as concrete, steel, and soil, with problems related to their interfaces like contact or friction. Because of the problem's difficulty, the finite element simulation is