Heavy metal (HM) pollution has long been a significant source of environmental deterioration and a problem for the safety of food. Iraqis prefer rice over any other food, and since heavy metals have a direct impact on health, their traces in rice have drawn particular attention. Before cooking rice, it is usual in Iraq to wash and soak it. Some 55 varieties of imported and local rice were sampled from Erbil city markets in 2022 with the aim of determining the concentration of As, Cd, Cr, Ni and Pb before and after soaking. Standard procedure of acid digestions was applied on the raw and soaked samples. The solutions were analyzed using ICPE-9820 Shimadzu. The mean concentrations of As, Cd, Cr, Ni and Pb (in mg/kg) in the rice samples before soaking was 0.655, 0.170, 0.160, 0.387, 0.489, respectively and after soaking 0.421, 0.109, 0.115, 0.124 and 0.336, respectively. The concentration of As and Pb was found to be beyond the optimum level of 0.2 mg/kg codex standards for rice; whereas Cd and Cr were within the proposed level of codex standards. Moreover, local rice showed higher concentration of (Cd and Cr), whereas (AS and Pb) concentration in imported rice was higher. Further, results validated that rice soaking can decrease levels of As, Cd, Cr, Ni and Pb (32.5%, 40.2%, 27.9%, 61.6% and 31.3%, respectively). These findings suggest that soaking as a kitchen practice has efficiency to evaporate metals and has a great influence on the reduction of toxic heavy metals and thus reduces exposure to toxic metals in rice
A newly developed analytical method was conducted for the determination of Ketotifen fumarate (KTF) in pharmaceuticals drugs via quenching of continuous fluorescence of 9(10H)-Acridone (ACD). The method was applied using flow injection system of a new homemade ISNAG fluorimeter with fluorescence measurements at ± 90◦ via 2×4 solar cell. The calibration graph was linear in the range of 1-45 mmol/L, with correlation coefficient r = 0.9762 and the limit of detection 29.785 µg/sample from the stepwise dilution for the minimum concentration in the linear dynamic ranged of the calibration graph. The method was successfully applied to the determination of Ketotifen fumarate in two different pharma
... Show MoreWater/oil emulsion is considered as the most refractory mixture to separate because of the interference of the two immiscible liquids, water and oil. This research presents a study of dewatering of water / kerosene emulsion using hydrocyclone. The effects of factors such as: feed flow rate (3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 L/min), inlet water concentration of the emulsion (5%, 7.5%, 10%, 12.5%, and 15% by volume), and split ratio (0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9) on the separation efficiency and pressure drop were studied. Dimensional analysis using Pi theorem was applied for the first time to model the hydrocyclone based on the experimental data. It was shown that the maximum separation efficiency; at split ratio 0.1, was 94.3% at 10% co
... Show MoreAsphaltene is one of the fractions of the crude oil which is soluble in aromatics such as benzene or toluene and insoluble in alkane such as n-heptane, n-pentane or petroleum ether (mixture of alkane compounds). Asphaltene precipitation is one of the most common problems that sometimes occurs in both oil recovery and refinery processes as a result of changing in pressure, oil composition, or temperature. Therefore the stability of asphaltene in the crude oil must be studied to show the tendency of it for precipitating asphaltene to prevent it (Asphaltene precipitation and deposition problem) and eliminate the burden of high treatment costs.
In the present study, saturate, aromatic, resin and asphaltene (SAR
... Show MoreFriction stir welding (FSW) of Tee-joints is obtained by inserting a specially designed rotating pin into the clamped blanks, through top plate (skin) to bottom plate (stringer), and then moving it along the joint, limiting the contact between the tool shoulder and the skin. The present work aims to investigate the defects occur for Tee-joint of an Aluminum alloy (Al 5456) with dimensions (180mm x 70mm) for the skin plate, (180mm x 30mm) for stringer plate and thickness of (4mm).
The effects of welding parameters such as rotational speed, linear speed, plunging depth, tool tilting, and die radii of welding fixture on the welding quality of Aluminum Alloy will be studied. Weld defects had been summarized and studied, and then the best
The thermal performance of three solar collectors with 3, 6 mm and without perforation absorber plate was assessed experimentally. The experimental tests were implemented in Baghdad during the January and February 2017. Five values of airflow rates range between 0.01 – 0.1 m3/s were used through the test with a constant airflow rate during the test day. The variation of the following parameters air temperature difference, useful energy, absorber plate temperature, and collector efficiency was recorded every 15 minutes. The experimental data reports that the increases the number of absorber plate perforations with a small diameter is more efficient rather than increasing the hole diameter of the absorber plate with decr
... Show MorePhotonic crystal fiber interferometers are used in many sensing applications. In this work, an in-reflection photonic crystal fiber (PCF) based on Mach-Zehnder (micro-holes collapsing) (MZ) interferometer, which exhibits high sensitivity to different volatile organic compounds (VOCs), without the needing of any permeable material. The interferometer is robust, compact, and consists of a stub photonic crystal fiber of large-mode area, photonic crystal fiber spliced to standard single mode fiber (SMF) (corning-28), this splicing occurs with optimized splice loss 0.19 dB In the splice regions the voids of the holey fiber are completely collapsed, which allows the excitation and recombination of core and cladding modes. The device reflection
... Show MoreGlobally, the COVID-19 pandemic’s development has presented significant societal and economic challenges. The carriers of COVID-19 transmission have also been identified as asymptomatic infected people. Yet, most epidemic models do not consider their impact when accounting for the disease’s indirect transmission. This study suggested and investigated a mathematical model replicating the spread of coronavirus disease among asymptomatic infected people. A study was conducted on every aspect of the system’s solution. The equilibrium points and the basic reproduction number were computed. The endemic equilibrium point and the disease-free equilibrium point had both undergone local stability analyses. A geometric technique was used
... Show MoreIn this paper, new method have been investigated using evolving algorithms (EA's) to cryptanalysis one of the nonlinear stream cipher cryptosystems which depends on the Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) unit by using cipher text-only attack. Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) which are used for attacking one of the nonlinear cryptosystems called "shrinking generator" using different lengths of cipher text and different lengths of combined LFSRs. GA and ACO proved their good performance in finding the initial values of the combined LFSRs. This work can be considered as a warning for a stream cipher designer to avoid the weak points, which may be f
... Show MoreThis study includes the preparation of the ferrite nanoparticles CuxCe0.3-XNi0.7Fe2O4 (where: x = 0, 0.05, 0.1, 0.15, 0.2, 0.25, 0.3) using the sol-gel (auto combustion) method, and citric acid was used as a fuel for combustion. The results of the tests conducted by X-ray diffraction (XRD), emitting-field scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray analyzer (EDX), and Vibration Sample Magnetic Device (VSM) showed that the compound has a face-centered cubic structure, and the lattice constant is increased with increasing Cu ion. On the other hand, the compound has apparent porosity and spherical particles, and t
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