The adsorption of Pb(II) ions onto bentonite and activated carbon was investigated. The effects of pH, initial adsorbent dosage, contact time and temperature were studied in batch experiments. The maximum adsorption capacities for bentonite and activated carbon were 0.0364 and 0.015 mg/mg, respectively. Thermodynamic parameters such as Gibbs free energy change, Enthalpy change and Entropy change have been calculated. These thermodynamic parameters indicated that the adsorption process was thermodynamically spontaneous under natural conditions and the adsorption was endothermic in nature. Experimental data were also tested in terms of adsorption kinetics, the results showed that the adsorption processes followed well pseudo second- order

Summary Kidney transplantation is widely performed nowadays as an optimal treatment of end stage kidney diseases. Complications such as stenosis in graft renal arteries anastomosis may occur. Different suturing techniques are available for renal artery anastomosis. We aimed to compare the incidence of renal artery stenosis of the transplanted kidney when two suture techniques (continuous or interrupted) used for renal artery anastomosis. Therefore, a retrospectively comparative study was conducted on 44 patients managed with kidney transplantation during the years 2009-2011. Patients assigned into two groups; first group included 20 patients namely, continuous suture group, and the second group included 24 patients in whom the allograft art

A second-order sliding mode control is used for high-order uncertain plants using equivalent control approach to improve the performance of control systems. They combine backstepping with quasi-continuous controller and twisting controllers. This paper considers a two of the most popular controllers that are used to solve the nonlinearities problem which are the backstepping quasi-continuous control (BQCC) and backstepping twisting controllers to control the angular velocity of a hydraulic motor to improve tracking performance and robustness to uncertainties. For the system dynamics, a linear state feedback with suitable high gain was designed as the virtual controller, where steady state error can be made arbitrarily small according to the

This paper presents a vibration suppression control design of cantilever beam using two piezoelectric ‎patches. One patch was used as ‎an actuator element, while the other was used as a sensor. The controller design was designed via the balance realization reduction method to elect the reduced order model that is most controllable and observable. ‎the sliding mode observer was designed to estimate six states from the reduced order model but three states are only used in the control law. Estimating a number of states larger than that used is in order to increase the estimation accuracy. Moreover, the state ‎estimation error is proved bounded. An ‎optimal LQR controller is designed then using the ‎estimated states with the slid

This work implements an Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal classifier. The implemented method uses Orthogonal Polynomials (OP) to convert the EEG signal samples to moments. A Sparse Filter (SF) reduces the number of converted moments to increase the classification accuracy. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to classify the reduced moments between two classes. The proposed method’s performance is tested and compared with two methods by using two datasets. The datasets are divided into 80% for training and 20% for testing, with 5 -fold used for cross-validation. The results show that this method overcomes the accuracy of other methods. The proposed method’s best accuracy is 95.6% and 99.5%, respectively. Finally, from the results, it

This study is to investigate the possibility of using activated carbon prepared from Iraqi date-pits (ADP) which are produced from palm trees (Phoenix dactylifera L.) as low-cost reactive material in the permeable reactive barrier (PRB) for treating lead (Pb⁺²) from the contaminated groundwater, and then compare the results experimentally with other common reactive materials such as commercial activated carbon (CAC), zeolite pellets (ZP). Factors influencing sorption such as contact time, initial pH of the solution, sorbent dosage, agitation speed, and initial lead concentration has been studied. Two isotherm models were used for the description of sorption data (Langmuir and Freundlich). The maximum lead sorp

Abstract-Servo motors are important parts of industry automation due to their several advantages such as cost and energy efficiency, simple design, and flexibility. However, the position control of the servo motor is a difficult task because of different factors of external disturbances, nonlinearities, and uncertainties. To tackle these challenges, an adaptive integral sliding mode control (AISMC) is proposed, in which a novel bidirectional adaptive law is constructed to reduce the control chattering. The proposed control has three steps to be designed. Firstly, a full-order integral sliding manifold is designed to improve the servo motor position tracking performance, in which the reaching phase is eliminated to achieve the invariance of

Health service institutions suffer from challenges resulting from the great changes that our world is witnessing today.  This has affected the value that these institutions add to the patient.

This research aims to identify the effect of integrating each of the techniques of QFD and value engineering for the health services provided to the patient to improve the value for him and thus obtain his satisfaction, which is reflected in the reputation of the surveyed hospitals. To achieve this, the descriptive analytical method was used, and a questionnaire was designed to collect the necessary data, which represents a measure of this research. The questionnaire was distri

Since the time it emerged, stylistics, as a field of knowledge which ‎combines both linguistics and literature, acquired a special status in the ‎linguistic arena. Its significance in complementing the meaning ‎delivered by linguistic means has been proven and acknowledged ‎through numerous stylistic analytic attempts of different literary works ‎and in different languages. The question put forward in this paper is ‎whether or not the stylistic analysis can work as effectively on translated ‎texts as it does on the original ones without having the results reached ‎by the analysis distorting the meaning of the original text. An attempt to ‎investigate this question is made herein by conducting a lexical stylistic ‎analysi