Perennial biofuel and cover crops systems are important for enhancing soil health and can provide numerous soil, agricultural, and environmental benefits. The study objective was to investigate the effects of cover crops and biofuel crops on soil hydraulic properties relative to traditional management for claypan soils. The study site included selected management practices: cover crop (CC) and no cover crop (NC) with corn/soybean rotation, switchgrass (SW), and miscanthus (MI). The CC mixture consisted of cereal rye, hairy vetch, and Austrian winter pea. The research site was located at Bradford Research Center in Missouri, USA, and was implemented on a Mexico silt loam. Intact soil cores (76‐mm diam. by 76‐mm long) were taken from the 0–10, 10–20, 20–30, and 30–40 cm depths with three plot replicates and two sub‐samples per plot replicate per depth. Soil hydraulic properties evaluated for each sample included: saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ksat), water retention, bulk density, and pore size distributions. Results showed with the test of Duncan's least significant differences that treatments of MI (1.18 Mg m−3) and SW (1.21 Mg m−3) had lower values of bulk density averaging across soil depth than CC (1.27 Mg m−3) and NC (1.31 Mg m). Management systems significantly increased Ksat with the biofuel treatments at 0–10 cm compared to NC system. The MI management showed a significant increase in macroporosity and fine mesoporosity as compared to other management systems. Slight changes have occurred in the measured soil physical properties for CC system compared to NC plots. Overall, increasing soil organic matter from more plant roots from long‐term biofuel cropping systems can improve soil water storage and crop productivity.
Abstract
The toughening of epoxy resins with the addition of organic or inorganic compounds is of great interest nowadays, considering their large scale of applications. In the present work, composites of epoxy are synthesized with kaolin particles having different particle sizes as reinforcement. Composites of epoxy with varying concentration (0 to 40 weight %) of kaolin was prepared by using hand lay method. The variation of mechanical properties such as modulus of elasticity, yield, tensile, and compressive strength with filler content was evaluated. The composite showed improved modulus of elasticity and compressive properties on addition of filler. In contrast, the tensile and yield strength of the composite
... Show MoreNanoferrite materials have been synthesized by sol-gel auto combustion method. The effect of doping different percentages of Y2O3 (0.34 µm) on the physical and mechanical properties of selected mixed ferrite [(Li2.5Fe0.5) 0.9(Co4Fe2O4) 0.1] by adding 10% Cobalt ferrite was studied. Physical properties (i.e. .density, porosity and water absorption) were affected by the doping, where the density increased about 32% at 6 wt% Y2O3, while porosity has a drastically decreased about 80% at 6% Y2O3 and has a correlation effect on the mechanical properties(Splitting tensile strength and Vicker
... Show Morehe paper presents the results of exposure of normal concrete to high temperatures (400 and 700°C). In addition to the exposure of steel reinforcement bar Ø 12 mm, where two types of steel reinforcement burning situations were performed. Directly exposed to high temperatures (400 and 700°C) and others were covered by concrete layer (15 mm). From the experimental results of fire exposure for 1 hour of 400 and 700°C and gradually cooled, it was found that the residual average percentage of compressive strength of concrete was 85.3 and 41.4%, while the residual average percentage of modulus of elasticity of concrete was 75 and 48%, respectively. The residual average percentage of yielding tensile stress (Ø 12 mm) after burning and cooling
... Show MoreTruncated distributions arise naturally in many practical situations. It’s a conditional distribution that develops when the parent distribution's domain is constrained to a smaller area. The distribution of a right truncated is one of the types of a single truncated that is restricted within a specific field and usually occurs when the specified period for the study is complete. Hence, this paper introduces Right Truncated Inverse Generalized Rayleigh Distribution (RTIGRD) with two parameters is introduced. Then, provided some properties such as; (probability density function, cumulative distribution function (CDF), survival function, hazard function, rth moment, mean, variance, Moment Generating Function, Skewness, kurtosi
... Show MoreThe current experiment was conducted to explore the effect of soil crude oil ( crude oil ) pollution on some wood properties of Casuarina equisetifolia. Four levels of pollution were applied on 40 (one-year) old seedlings . Measurements were taken by cutting the trees after two growth seasons from date of pollution .The studied Properties were fiber length, diameter, wall thickness, and specific gravity of external and internal wood. Results showed an adverse effect of pollution on fiber diameter more than on fiber length. While wall thickness did not affect. Fiber dimensions of external wood showed higher values than that of internal one, especially for fiber
... Show MoreAA3003-H14 aluminum alloy plates were welded by friction stir welding and TIG welding.
Fatigue properties of the welded joints were evaluated based on the superior tensile properties for
FSW at 1500 rpm rotational speed and 80 mm/min welding speed. However, there is not much
information available on effect of welding parameters with evolution of fatigue life of friction stir
welds. The present study experimentally analyzed fatigue properties for base, FSW, and TIG welds
of AA 3003-H14 aluminum alloy. Fatigue properties of FSW joints were slightly lower than the
base metal and higher than TIG welding.
Zinc sulfide (ZnS) thin films were deposited on glass substrates using pulsed laser deposition technique. The laser used is the Q-switched Nd: YAG laser with 1064nm wavelength and 1Hz pulse repetition rate and varying laser energy 700mJ-1000mJ with 25 pulse. The substrate temperature was kept constant at 100°C. The structural, morphological and optical properties of ZnS thin films were characterized with X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscope (AFM) and UV-VIS spectrophotometer.
Ti6Al4V thin film was prepared on glass substrate by RF
sputtering method. The effect of RF power on the optical properties
of the thin films has been investigated using UV-visible
Spectrophotometer. It's found that the absorbance and the extinction
coefficient (k) for deposited thin films increase with increasing
applied power, while another parameters such as dielectric constant
and refractive index decrease with increasing RF power.
Using photo electrochemical etching technique (PEC), porous silicon (PS) layers were produced on n-type silicon (Si) wafers to generate porous silicon for n-type with an orientation of (111) The results of etching time were investigated at: (5,10,15 min). X-ray diffraction experiments revealed differences between the surface of the sample sheet and the synthesized porous silicon. The largest crystal size is (30 nm) and the lowest crystal size is (28.6 nm) The analysis of Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FESEM) were used to research the morphology of porous silicon layer. As etching time increased, AFM findings showed that root mean square (RMS) of roughness and po
... Show MoreA polycrystalline CdTe film has been prepared by thermal evaporation technique on glass substrate at substrate temperature 423 K with 1.0 m thicknesses. The film was heated at various annealing temperature under vacuum (Ta =473, 523 and K). Some of physical properties of prepared films such as structural and optical properties were investigated. The patterns of X-ray diffraction analysis showed that the structure of CdTe powder and all films were polycrystalline and consist of a mixture of cubic and hexagonal phases and preferred orientation at (111) direction.
The optical measurements showed that un annealed and annealed CdTe films had direct energy gap (Eg). The Eg increased with increasing Ta. The refractive index and the real p