Low grade crude palm oil (LGCPO) presents as an attractive option as feedstock for biodiesel production due to its low cost and non-competition with food resources. Typically, LGCPO contains high contents of free fatty acids (FFA), rendering it impossible in direct trans-esterification processes due to the saponification reaction. Esterification is the typical pre-treatment process to reduce the FFA content and to produce fatty acid methyl ester (FAME). The pre-treatment of LGCPO using two different acid catalysts, such as titanium oxysulphate sulphuric acid complex hydrate (TiOSH) and 5-sulfosalicylic acid dihydrate (5-SOCAH) was investigated for the first time in this study. The optimum conditions for the homogenous catalyst (5-SOCAH) wer

The research aims to determine optimal urban planning and design indicators of the urban clusters form in hot arid zones through studying of three urban areas in Baghdad, analyzing their urban indicators which include floor area ratio (FAR), urban clusters height, building density or land coverage, green areas, paved areas, shading ratio and how they affect urban temperature. The research reached the conclusion that air outdoor temperature on urban areas affected primarily by shadows casted on the ground, the effect of shaded area equals (5) times the effect of paved areas and (3.7) times the effect of green areas, this means that increasing urban clusters height in hot arid zones could minimize air outdoor temperature, building

In this work, the nuclear electromagnetic moments for the ground and low-lying excited states for sd shell nuclei have been calculated, resulting in a revised database with 56 magnetic dipole moments and 41 electric quadrupole moments. The shell model calculations are performed for each sd isotope chain, considering the sensitivity of changing the sd two-body effective interactions USDA, USDE, CWH and HBMUSD in the calculation of the one-body transition density matrix elements. The calculations incorporate the single-particle wave functions of the Skyrme interaction to generate a one-body potential in Hartree–Fock theory to calculate the single-particle matrix elements. For most sd shell nuclei, the experimental data are well rep

Broyden update is one of the one-rank updates which solves the unconstrained optimization problem but this update does not guarantee the positive definite and the symmetric property of Hessian matrix.

In this paper the guarantee of positive definite and symmetric property for the Hessian matrix will be established by updating the vector  which represents the difference between the next gradient and the current gradient of the objective function assumed to be twice continuous and differentiable .Numerical results are reported to compare the proposed method with the Broyden method under standard problems.

This paper proposes a new strategy to enhance the performance and accuracy of the Spiral dynamic algorithm (SDA) for use in solving real-world problems by hybridizing the SDA with the Bacterial Foraging optimization algorithm (BFA). The dynamic step size of SDA makes it a useful exploitation approach. However, it has limited exploration throughout the diversification phase, which results in getting trapped at local optima. The optimal initialization position for the SDA algorithm has been determined with the help of the chemotactic strategy of the BFA optimization algorithm, which has been utilized to improve the exploration approach of the SDA. The proposed Hybrid Adaptive Spiral Dynamic Bacterial Foraging (HASDBF)

The research problem arose from the researchers’ sense of the importance of Digital Intelligence (DI), as it is a basic requirement to help students engage in the digital world and be disciplined in using technology and digital techniques, as students’ ideas are sufficiently susceptible to influence at this stage in light of modern technology. The research aims to determine the level of DI among university students using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. To verify this, the researchers built a measure of DI. The measure in its final form consisted of (24) items distributed among (8) main skills, and the validity and reliability of the tool were confirmed. It was applied to a sample of 139 male and female students who were chosen