Fine aggregate (Sand) is a necessary material used in concrete construction purposes, it’s naturally available and it’s widely used around the world for different parts of construction in any building mainly for filling the voids between gravel. Sand gradation is important for different composite materials, and it gives good cohesion when compared with coarse sand that provides strength for the building. Therefore, sand is necessary to be tested before it is used and mixed with other building materials in construction and the specimen must be selected carefully to represent the real material in the field. The specimen weight must be larger than the required weight for test. When the weight of the sand sample increases the approximate precision desired increases. In this study, an approximated multilinear function for Fuller’s curve on the logarithmic scale was used to simulate the fine aggregate (sand) numerically. In order to get the effect of different samples, a stochastic analysis was done by employing 100 realizations of specimens, has been conducted to study the effect of sampling on sieve analysis and the root mean square error (RMSE) for the variation between desired and sampled curves. Then the results were compared with available specifications recommendations.
In this study, the upgrading of Iraqi heavy crude oil was achieved utilizing the solvent deasphalting approach (SDA) and enhanced solvent deasphalting (e-SDA) by adding Nanosilica (NS). The NS was synthesized from local sand. The XRD result, referred to as the amorphous phase, has a wide peak at 2Θ= (22 - 23º) The inclusion of hydrogen-bonded silanol groups (Si–O–H) and siloxane groups (Si–O–Si) in the FTIR spectra. The SDA process was handled using n-pentane solvent at various solvent to oil ratios (SOR) (4-16/1ml/g), room and reflux temperature, and 0.5 h mixing time. In the e-SDA process, various fractions of the NS (1–7 wt.%) have been utilized with 61 nm particle size and 560.86 m²/g surface area in the presence of 12 m
... Show MoreThe electrospun nanofibers membranes have gained considerable interest in water filtration applications. In this work, the fabrication and characterization of the electrospun polyacrylonitrile-based nonwoven nanofibers membrane are reported. Then, the membrane's performance and antifouling properties were evaluated in removing emulsified oil using a cross flow filtration system. The membranes were fabricated with different polyacrylonitrile (PAN) concentrations (8, 11, and 14 wt. %) in N, N-Dimethylformamide (DMF) solvent resulted in various average fiber sizes, porosity, contact angle, permeability, oil rejection, and antifouling properties. Analyses of surface morphology of the fabricated membranes before and after oil removal revealed
... Show MoreComputer-aided diagnosis (CAD) has proved to be an effective and accurate method for diagnostic prediction over the years. This article focuses on the development of an automated CAD system with the intent to perform diagnosis as accurately as possible. Deep learning methods have been able to produce impressive results on medical image datasets. This study employs deep learning methods in conjunction with meta-heuristic algorithms and supervised machine-learning algorithms to perform an accurate diagnosis. Pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or auto-encoder are used for feature extraction, whereas feature selection is performed using an ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. Ant colony optimization helps to search for the bes
... Show MoreAmorphization of drug has been considered as an attractive approach in improving drug solubility and bioavailability. Unlike their crystalline counterparts, amorphous materials lack the long-range order of molecular packing and present the highest energy state of a solid material. Co-amorphous systems (CAM) are an innovative formulation technique by where the amorphous drugs are stabilized via powerful intermolecular interactions by means of a low molecular co-former.
This review highlights the different approaches in the preparation of co-amorphous drug delivery system, the proper selection of the co-formers. In addition, the recent advances in characterization, Industrial scale and formulation will be discussed.
Clinical keratoconus (KCN) detection is a challenging and time-consuming task. In the diagnosis process, ophthalmologists must revise demographic and clinical ophthalmic examinations. The latter include slit-lamb, corneal topographic maps, and Pentacam indices (PI). We propose an Ensemble of Deep Transfer Learning (EDTL) based on corneal topographic maps. We consider four pretrained networks, SqueezeNet (SqN), AlexNet (AN), ShuffleNet (SfN), and MobileNet-v2 (MN), and fine-tune them on a dataset of KCN and normal cases, each including four topographic maps. We also consider a PI classifier. Then, our EDTL method combines the output probabilities of each of the five classifiers to obtain a decision b
This study proposes a new method for designing adaptive routing algorithms for three‐dimensional (3D) networks‐on‐chip (NoCs). This method is based on extending the existing 2D turn model adaptive routing to a 3D scenario. A 3D plane‐balanced approach with maximal degree of adaptiveness is achieved by applying a well‐defined set of rules for different strata of the 3D NoC. The proposed method is applicable to any of the turn models. In this study, the authors employ odd–even turn model as a basis for introducing the proposed strategy. Experimental results show that the new 3D odd–even turn model can achieve up to 28.5% improvement in performance over conventional 3D odd–even approach. The improvement is consistent fo
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