A cantilevered piezoelectric beam with a tip mass at its free end is a common energy harvester configuration. This paper introduces a new principle of designing such a harvester which increases the generated voltage without changing the natural frequency of the harvester: The attraction force between two permanent magnets is used to add stiffness to the system. This magnetic stiffening counters the effect of the tip mass on the natural frequency. Three setups incorporating piezoelectric bimorph cantilevers of the same type in different mechanical configurations are compared theoretically and experimentally to investigate the feasibility of this principle. Theoretical and experimental results show that magnetically stiffe

   This research provides a novel technique for using metal organic frameworks (HKUST-1) as a gas storage system for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in Iraqi vehicles to avoid the drawbacks of the currently employed method of LPG gas storage. A low-cost adsorbent called HKUST-1 was prepared and characterized in this research to investigate its ability for propane storage at different temperatures (25, 30, 35, and 40 ^oC) and pressures of (1-7) bar. HKUST-1 was made using a hydrothermal method and characterized using powder X-ray diffraction, BET surface area, scanning electron microscopic (SEM), and Fourier Transforms infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). The HKUST-1 was produced using a hydrothermal technique and possesses a high crys

Numerical investigation has been carried out on heat transfer and friction factor characteristics of copper-water nanofluid flow in a constant heat-fluxed tube with the existence of new configuration of vortex generator using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation. Two types of swirl flow generator: Classical twisted tape (CTT) and Parabolic-cut twisted tape (PCT) with a different twist ratio (y= 2.93, 3.91 and 4.89) and different cut depth (w= 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 cm) with 2% and 4% volume concentration

      Detecting and subtracting the Motion objects from backgrounds is one of the most important areas. The development of cameras and their widespread use in most areas of security, surveillance, and others made face this problem. The difficulty of this area is unstable in the classification of the pixels (foreground or background). This paper proposed a suggested background subtraction algorithm based on the histogram. The classification threshold is adaptively calculated according to many tests. The performance of the proposed algorithms was compared with state-of-the-art methods in complex dynamic scenes.

Natural dye sensitized solar cell was prepared using strawberry and pomegranate dyes with anatase nanocrystalline titanium dioxide powder. A study of the optical properties of the two dyes, involving the absorption spectrum was determined in the visible region. I-V characteristics under illumination were performed. The results showed that the two prepared dye sensitized solar cells have acceptable values efficiency about (0.94 with Fill factor (45)) and (0.74 with Fill factor (44)) for strawberry and pomegranate dyes, respectively.

        In this study the design and installation of evaporative air cooler was carried out using completely outdoor air (fresh air) according to two stage evaporative cooling principle. The laboratory equipment was installed by designing and manufacturing a cross flow plate heat exchanger, where aluminum plates used for this purpose with dimensions (50 × 30 × 40 cm). The surfaces of heat exchanger were covered by sawdust from wetted channels side, to increase the percentage of wetting these surfaces and hence improve the performance and efficiency of air cooler.

        An experimental study was carried out to estimate the performance of cooling system, where som

The efficiency of internal combustion engines (ICE) is usually about thirty percent of the total energy of the fuel. The residual energy is lost in the exhaust gas, the lubrication, and the cooling water in the radiators. Recently much of the researcher’s efforts have focused on taking advantage of wasted energy of the exhaust gas. Using a thermoelectric generator (TEG) is one of the promising ways. However, TEG depends entirely on the temperature difference, which may be offered by the exhaust muffler. An experimental test has been conducted to study the thermal performance of a different muffler internal design. The researchers resort to the use of lost energy in an ICE using TEG, which is one of the ways to take adv

In this work, the performance of the receiver in a quantum cryptography system based on BB84 protocol is scaled by calculating the Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBER) of the receiver. To apply this performance test, an optical setup was arranged and a circuit was designed and implemented to calculate the QBER. This electronic circuit is used to calculate the number of counts per second generated by the avalanche photodiodes set in the receiver. The calculated counts per second are used to calculate the QBER for the receiver that gives an indication for the performance of the receiver. Minimum QBER, 6%, was obtained with avalanche photodiode excess voltage equals to 2V and laser diode power of 3.16 nW at avalanche photodiode temperature of -10