In this work, a novel design for the NiO/TiO2 heterojunction solar cells is presented. Highly-pure nanopowders prepared by dc reactive magnetron sputtering technique were used to form the heterojunctions. The electrical characteristics of the proposed design were compared to those of a conventional thin film heterojunction design prepared by the same technique. A higher efficiency of 300% was achieved by the proposed design. This attempt can be considered as the first to fabricate solar cells from highly-pure nanopowders of two different semiconductors.

Treated effluent wastewater is considered an alternative water resource which can provide an important contribution for using it in different purposes, so, the wastewater quality is very important for knowing its suitability for different uses before discharging it into fresh water ecosystems. The wastewater quality index (WWQI) may be considered as a useful and effective tool to assess wastewater quality by indicating one value representing the overall characteristic of the wastewater. It could be used to indicate the suitability of wastewater for different uses in water quality management and decision making. The present study was conducted to evaluate the Al-Diwaniyah sewage treatment plant (STP) effluent quality based on wastewa

In this paper, the memorization capability of a multilayer interpolative neural network is exploited to estimate a mobile position based on three angles of arrival. The neural network is trained with ideal angles-position patterns distributed uniformly throughout the region. This approach is compared with two other analytical methods, the average-position method which relies on finding the average position of the vertices of the uncertainty triangular region and the optimal position method which relies on finding the nearest ideal angles-position pattern to the measured angles. Simulation results based on estimations of the mobile position of particles moving along a nonlinear path show that the interpolative neural network approach outperf

Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) is the technology of electronically extracting intended data from marked fields, such as squareand bubbles fields, on printed forms. OMR technology is particularly useful for applications in which large numbers of hand-filled forms need to be processed quickly and with a great degree of accuracy. The technique is particularly popular with schools and universities for the reading in of multiple choice exam papers. This paper proposed OMRbased on Modify Multi-Connect Architecture (MMCA) associative memory, its work in two phases: training phase and recognition phase. The proposed method was also able to detect more than one or no selected choice. Among 800 test samples with 8 types of grid answer sheets and tota

The aim of this study is to compare the effects of three methods: problem-based learning (PBL), PBL with lecture method, and conventional teaching on self-directed learning skills among physics undergraduates. The actual sample size comprises of 122 students, who were selected randomly from the Physics Department, College of Education in Iraq. In this study, the pre- and post-test were done and the instruments were administered to the students for data collection. The data was analyzed and statistical results rejected null hypothesis of this study. This study revealed that there are no signifigant differences between PBL and PBL with lecture method, thus the PBL without or with lecture method enhances the self-directed learning skills bette

This study evaluated the effect of two different types of amino group-containing pharmacological inhibitors on titanium corrosion under acidic conditions. The first inhibitor examined was the antibiotic trimethoprim. The second inhibitor studied was the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug voltaren. The results showed that titanium had a high corrosion current in the absence of a corrosion inhibitor, however, trimethoprim notably enhanced corrosion resistance and protection percentages of titanium (%IE) at higher concentrations by adhering to the metal surface, as evidenced by improved protection percentages. Furthermore, the results showed that as Voltaren concentration was increased, both corrosion resistance and inhibition efficie

This paper is focused on orthogonal function approximation technique FAT-based adaptive backstepping control of a geared DC motor coupled with a rotational mechanical component. It is assumed that all parameters of the actuator are unknown including the torque-current constant (i.e., unknown input coefficient) and hence a control system with three motor control modes is proposed: 1) motor torque control mode, 2) motor current control mode, and 3) motor voltage control mode. The proposed control algorithm is a powerful tool to control a dynamic system with an unknown input coefficient. Each uncertain parameter/term is represented by a linear combination of weighting and orthogonal basis function vectors. Chebyshev polynomial is used

Each school of Islamic jurisprudence has principles and rules upon which the diligent work in these schools is based. This is due to the view of sanctification of these rulings, as they are divine rulings. Therefore, the goal is to reach a ruling that represents the intent of the legislator as much as possible.
Hence, these schools of thought established rules for issuing fatwas with the intention of restricting the performance of a fatwa to the hands of those who are qualified for it and have met its conditions, so they gave priority to the most knowledgeable person over others to perform the fatwa. In the Hanafi school of thought, for example, the saying of Imam Abu Hanifa (may God have mercy on him) is given precedence over others,

Background: Animal bite is one of the public health problems all over the world, especially in poor countries. Animal bites have an impact on human health due to rabies disease, which is a viral transmitted disease from animal to human with a high mortality rate.
Objective: To determine the epidemiological characteristics of animal bite cases by person, time, and place.
Method: Descriptive cross sectional study was done by reviewing cases caused by animal bites., Data including the demographic characteristics of age, gender, occupation, site of bite, and attending health institutions searching treatment were all included.
Results: There were 11600 animal bite cases. Most of bites caused by stray dogs 11577(99.8%), and the males

Peak ground acceleration (PGA) is one of the critical factors that affect the determination of earthquake intensity. PGA is generally utilized to describe ground motion in a particular zone and is able to efficiently predict the parameters of site ground motion for the design of engineering structures. Therefore, novel models are developed to forecast PGA in the case of the Iraqi database, which utilizes the particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach. A data set of 187 historical ground-motion recordings in Iraq’s tectonic regions was used to build the explicit proposed models. The proposed PGA models relate to different seismic parameters, including the magnitude of the earthquake (Mw), average shear-wave velocity (VS30), focal depth (FD