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.
The piled raft is a geotechnical composite construction consisting of three elements: piles, raft and soil.
In the design of piled rafts, the load shared between the piles and the raft, and the piles are used up to a
load level that can be of the same order of magnitude as the bearing capacity of a comparable single
pile or even greater. Therefore, the piled raft foundation allows reduction of settlements in a very
economic way as compared to traditional foundation concepts.
This paper presents experimental study to investigate the behavior of piled raft system in sandy
soil. A small scale “prototype” model was tested in a sand box with load applied to the system through
a compression machine. The settlement was
The interests toward developing accurate automatic face emotion recognition methodologies are growing vastly, and it is still one of an ever growing research field in the region of computer vision, artificial intelligent and automation. However, there is a challenge to build an automated system which equals human ability to recognize facial emotion because of the lack of an effective facial feature descriptor and the difficulty of choosing proper classification method. In this paper, a geometric based feature vector has been proposed. For the classification purpose, three different types of classification methods are tested: statistical, artificial neural network (NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). A modified K-Means clustering algorithm
... Show MoreThe influx of Arab Qahtani and Nizari tribes continued to the countries of Baluchistan and the Levant in pre-Islamic times until the Levant became open to the Arab-Islamic tide during the first century AH. The Islamic Orient until the early Islamic Arab Army reached the western borders of China. What we will see in the folds of the search.
A mounted specimen of a mustelid animal deposited in the Kurdistan Museum of Natural History, Salahaddin University, Erbil proved to be Mustela erminea (Linnaeus, 1758) and represents a new record for the mammalian fauna of Iraq. Its measurements and some biological noted are provided. Also, two passerine birds; the Red-headed bunting, Emberiza bruniceps Brandt, 1841(Family, Emberizidae) and the Variable wheatear, Oenanthe picata (Blyth, 1847) (Family, Muscicapidae) were recorded for the first time in Iraq. Furthermore, the tree frog Hyla savignyi Audouin, 1829 was found in two locations north east of Iraq with spotted dorsum and having interesting behavior in having the capabil
... Show MoreUnlike fault diagnosis approaches based on the direct analysis of current and voltage signals, this paper proposes a diagnosis of induction motor faults through monitoring the variations in motor's parameters when it is subjected to an open circuit or short circuit faults. These parameters include stator and rotor resistances, self-inductances, and mutual inductance. The genetic algorithm and the trust-region method are used for the estimation process. Simulation results confirm the efficiency of both the genetic algorithm and the trust-region method in estimating the motor parameters; however, better performance in terms of estimation time is obtained when the trust-region method is adopted. The results also show the po
... Show MoreIn recent years, the performance of Spatial Data Infrastructures for governments and companies is a task that has gained ample attention. Different categories of geospatial data such as digital maps, coordinates, web maps, aerial and satellite images, etc., are required to realize the geospatial data components of Spatial Data Infrastructures. In general, there are two distinct types of geospatial data sources exist over the Internet: formal and informal data sources. Despite the growth of informal geospatial data sources, the integration between different free sources is not being achieved effectively. The adoption of this task can be considered the main advantage of this research. This article addresses the research question of how the
... Show MoreThe current study aims to determine the extent of SOMO's interest in governance and whether this interest is sufficient to be reflected in enhancing its organizational reputation, and the field of research was in the oil marketing company SOMO. (109), (105) questionnaires were distributed, (94) forms and (11) forms were not retrieved, and the valid questionnaires had reached (91). The analytical and descriptive approach was used for the study, and the current research has found a positive impact of government on the reputation of the organization, and this research demonstrated the existence of the proposed relationship and the impact between governance and the reputation of the organization.
Bac kground:: Septal deviation is one of the commonest anatomical deformities of the nasal skeleton, this deviation is usually accompanied by compensatory hypertrophy of the inferior turbinate on the concave side that will accentuate the severity of nasal obstruction.
Objectives: To evaluate the effect of septoplasty on the size of the inferior turbinate in patients with nasal septum deviation.
Methods: This is a prospective study of 25 patients attending the otolaryngological department at Al-Jirahat teaching hospital from September 2011 to November 2013, complaining mainly of nasal obstruction. Otolaryngological examination had shown nasal septum deviation. The cross sectional areas of inferior turbinates were measured with compu
Numerous trace elements, notably metals, are essential for the normal functioning of several biological reactions, especially as enzyme cofactors. Several Trace elements refer to essential micronutrients required in minimal quantities for certain biological functions pertaining to human metabolism, albeit their minimal concentrations in the organism. Nonetheless, our understanding of this topic is considerably restricted, and emerging insights into their metabolic functions necessitate contributions and have implications across various domains, encompassing nutritional chemistry, with a focus on analytical chemistry, biological sciences, medicine, pharmacology, and agricultural sciences.