Most approaches to combat antibiotic resistant bacteria concentrate on discovering new antibiotics or modifying existing ones. However, one of the most promising alternatives is the use of bacteriophages. This study was focused on the isolation of bacteriophages that are specific to some of commonly human pathogens namely E. coli, Streptococcus pyogenes, Staphylococcus aureus, Proteus mirabilis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Salmonella spp. and Klebsiella pneumoniae. These bacteriophages were isolated from sewages that were collected from four different locations in Kirkuk City. Apart from S. pyogenes, bacteriophages specific to all tested bacteria were successfully isolated and tested for their effectiveness by spot test. The most effective

The quality of drinking water is considered among the most urgent issues worldwide nowadays. Ensuring safe water for human consumption remains the highest priority, while challenges also persist in meeting the water quality needs for industrial and agricultural uses. Most of the relevant studies lack accuracy in assessing water quality. Therefore, this study aims to forecast the quality of drinking water along the Tigris River in Iraq following a new approach. A developed forecasting model that utilizes the gravitational search algorithm (GSA) was deployed. The heuristic optimization tool was utilized for the prediction of the water quality index (WQI) in the research area. Out of twelve water stations, 575 samples were gather

This study aims to find the effect of water-cement ratio on the compressive strength of concrete by using ultrasonic pulse velocity test (UPVT). Over 230 standard cube specimens were used in this study, with dimensions of 150mm, and concrete cubes were cured in water at 20 °C. Also, the specimens used in the study were made of concrete with varied water-cement ratio contents from 0.48 to 0.59. The specimens were taken from Diyarbakir-Turkey concrete centers and tested at the structure and material science lab, civil engineering, faculty of engineering from Dicle University.  The UPV measurement and compressive strength tests were carried out at the concrete age of 28 days. Their UPV and compressive strength ranged

It is well known that drilling fluid is a key parameter for optimizing drilling operations, cleaning the hole, and managing the rig hydraulics and margins of surge and swab pressures. Although the experimental works represent valid and reliable results, they are expensive and time consuming. In contrast, continuous and regular determination of the rheological fluid properties can perform its essential functions during good construction. The aim of this study is to develop empirical models to estimate the drilling mud rheological properties of water-based fluids with less need for lab measurements. This study provides two predictive techniques, multiple regression analysis and artificial neural networks, to determine the rheological

One of the important units in Sharq Dijla Water Treatment Plant (WTP) first and second extensions are the alum solution preparation and dosing unit. The existing operation of this unit accomplished manually starting from unloading the powder alum in the preparation basin and ending by controlling the alum dosage addition through the dosing pumps to the flash mix chambers. Because of the modern trend of monitoring and control the automatic operation of WTPs due to the great benefits that could be gain from optimum equipment operation, reducing the operating costs and human errors. This study deals with how to transform the conventional operation to an automatic monitoring and controlling system depending on a Programmable

A piezoelectric cantilever beam with a tip mass at its free end is a common energy harvester configuration. This article introduces a new principle of designing such a harvester that increases the generated power without changing the resonance 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 efficient operation frequency. Five set-ups 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 stiffened harve

This paper presents designing an adaptive state feedback controller (ASFC) for a magnetic levitation system (MLS), which is an unstable system and has high nonlinearity and represents a challenging control problem. First, a nonadaptive state feedback controller (SFC) is designed by linearization about a selected equilibrium point and designing a SFC by pole-placement method to achieve maximum overshoot of 1.5% and settling time of 1s (5% criterion). When the operating point changes, the designed controller can no longer achieve the design specifications, since it is designed based on a linearization about a different operating point. This gives rise to utilizing the adaptive control scheme to parameterize the state feedback controll