Due to economic reasons or need for environmental conservatism or also preserve the natural resources; there has been an increasing shift towards the use of reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) materials in the pavement construction industry. Therefore, use the Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP) has been enormously increased in pavement construction and has been become common practice in many countries. Nevertheless, this is a relatively new concept in Iraq, and has to be remarked that is not used RAP in the production of HMA and this valuable material is mostly degraded. For this purpose, the reclaimed materials were collected from deteriorated pavement segments. The components of asphalt mixtures consist of: two asphalt penetration grades (40-50 and 85-100) brought from Daurah refinery. The aggregate gradation consists of (19) mm maximum size with limestone dust as a mineral filler. This work involved using the waste engine oil as a rejuvenating agent. All the types of tests result demonstrated that all mixtures, which contain RAP, have good properties compared with the virgin mixture. This demonstrated that mixtures with high RAP content could be successfully designed to meet the local volumetric and performance-specification requirements.
Finding communities of connected individuals in complex networks is challenging, yet crucial for understanding different real-world societies and their interactions. Recently attention has turned to discover the dynamics of such communities. However, detecting accurate community structures that evolve over time adds additional challenges. Almost all the state-of-the-art algorithms are designed based on seemingly the same principle while treating the problem as a coupled optimization model to simultaneously identify community structures and their evolution over time. Unlike all these studies, the current work aims to individually consider this three measures, i.e. intra-community score, inter-community score, and evolution of community over
... Show MoreThe risk of significant concern is resistance to antibiotics for public health. The alternative treatment of metallic nanoparticles (NPs), such as heavy metals, effects on antibiotic resistance bacteria with different types of antibiotics of - impossible to treat using noval eco-friendly synthesis technique nanoparticles copper oxide (CuO NPs) preparation from S. epidermidis showed remarkable antimicrobial activity against S.aureus Minimum inhibitory concentra range (16,32,64,256,512) µg/ml via well diffusion method in vitro, discover those concentrations effected in those bacteria and the best concentration is 64 µg/ml, characterization CuO NPs to prove this included atomic force microscope, UV, X-ray Diffraction and TEM, and ant
... Show MoreCorrect 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
... Show MoreOptimizing the Access Point (AP) deployment has a great role in wireless applications due to the need for providing an efficient communication with low deployment costs. Quality of Service (QoS), is a major significant parameter and objective to be considered along with AP placement as well the overall deployment cost. This study proposes and investigates a multi-level optimization algorithm called Wireless Optimization Algorithm for Indoor Placement (WOAIP) based on Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO). WOAIP aims to obtain the optimum AP multi-floor placement with effective coverage that makes it more capable of supporting QoS and cost-effectiveness. Five pairs (coverage, AP deployment) of weights, signal thresholds and received s
... Show MoreIn this work, an optical fiber biomedical sensor for detecting the ratio of the hemoglobin in the blood is presented. A surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-based coreless optical fiber was developed and implemented using single- and multi-mode optical fibers. The sensor is also utilized to evaluate refractive indices and concentrations of hemoglobin in blood samples, with 40 nm thickness of (20 nm Au and 20 nm Ag) to increase the sensitivity. It is found in practice that when the sensitive refractive index increases, the resonant wavelength increases due to the decrease in energy.
The emphasis of Master Production Scheduling (MPS) or tactic planning is on time and spatial disintegration of the cumulative planning targets and forecasts, along with the provision and forecast of the required resources. This procedure eventually becomes considerably difficult and slow as the number of resources, products and periods considered increases. A number of studies have been carried out to understand these impediments and formulate algorithms to optimise the production planning problem, or more specifically the master production scheduling (MPS) problem. These algorithms include an Evolutionary Algorithm called Genetic Algorithm, a Swarm Intelligence methodology called Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA), Bat Algorithm (BAT), T
... Show MoreThe concept of the active contour model has been extensively utilized in the segmentation and analysis of images. This technology has been effectively employed in identifying the contours in object recognition, computer graphics and vision, biomedical processing of images that is normal images or medical images such as Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI), X-rays, plus Ultrasound imaging. Three colleagues, Kass, Witkin and Terzopoulos developed this energy, lessening “Active Contour Models” (equally identified as Snake) back in 1987. Being curved in nature, snakes are characterized in an image field and are capable of being set in motion by external and internal forces within image data and the curve itself in that order. The present s
... Show MoreSustainable vegetative management plays a significant role in improving soil quality in degraded agricultural landscapes by enhancing soil microbial biomass. This study investigated the effects of grass buffers (GBs), biomass crops (BCs), grass waterways (GWWs), and agroforestry buffers (ABs) on soil microbial biomass and soil organic C (SOC) compared with continuous corn (
A robust video-bitrate adaptive scheme at client-aspect plays a significant role in keeping a good quality of video streaming technology experience. Video quality affects the amount of time the video has turned off playing due to the unfilled buffer state. Therefore to maintain a video streaming continuously with smooth bandwidth fluctuation, a video buffer structure based on adapting the video bitrate is considered in this work. Initially, the video buffer structure is formulated as an optimal control-theoretic problem that combines both video bitrate and video buffer feedback signals. While protecting the video buffer occupancy from exceeding the limited operating level can provide continuous video str
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