The present work reports the performance of three types of polyethersulfone (PES) membrane in the removal of highly polluting and toxic lead Pb2+ and cadmium Cd2+ ions from a single salt. This study investigated the effect of operating variables, including pH, types of PES membrane, and feed concentration, on the separation process. The transport parameters and mass transfer coefficient (k) of the membranes were estimated using the combined film theory-solution-diffusion (CFSD), combined film theory-Spiegler-Kedem (CFSK), and combined film theory-finely-porous (CFFP) membrane transport models. Various parameters were used to estimate the enrichment factors, concentration polarization modulus, and Péclet number. The pH values significantly affected the permeation flux of the Pb2+ solution but only had a slight effect on the Cd2+ solution. However, Cd2+ rejection was highly improved by increasing the pH value. The rejection of the PES membranes increased greatly as the heavy metal concentration rose, while the heavy metal concentration moderately affected the permeation flux. The maximum rejection of Pb2+ in a single-salt solution was 99%, 97.5%, and 98% for a feed solution containing 10 mg Pb/L at pH 6, 6.2, and 5.7, for PES1, PES2, and PES3, respectively. The maximum rejection of Cd2+ in single-salt solutions was 78%, 50.2%, and 44% for a feed solution containing 10 mg Cd/L at pH 6.5, 6.2, and 6.5, for PES1, PES2, and PES3, respectively. The analysis of the experimental data using the CFSD, CFSK, and CFFP models showed a good agreement between the theoretical and experimental results. The effective membrane thickness and active skin layer thickness were evaluated using the CFFP model, indicating that the Péclet number is important for determining the mechanism of separation by diffusion.
In this study, the effect of pumping power on the conversion efficiency of nonlinear crystal (KTP) was investigated using laser pump-power technique. The results showed that the higher the pumping power values, the greater the conversion efficiency (η) and, as the crystal thickness increases within limitations, the energy conversion efficiency increases at delay time of (0.333 ns) and at room temperature. Efficiency of 80% at length of KTP crystal (L = 1.75 X 10-3 m) and Pin = 28MW, and also, compare the experimental results with numerical results by using MATLAB program.
Biocompatible gold nanoparticles were successfully synthesized by hibiscus plant leaf extract as a bioreactor. The prepared nanoparticles were evaluated using UV/Vis spectroscopy, Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray Diffraction and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) . The study also investigated the effect of the different gamma irradiation doses on the size and dispersion of the produced nanoparticles. In UV- Vis spectra, the peak of Au NPs' surface plasmon resonance (SPR) was detected as a single peak at 543 nm. The gamma irradiation induced a blue shift in the SPR peak, which indicates that it might be applied as affective factor for size control. Physical as well as chemi
... Show MoreBackground. “Polyetheretherketone (PEEK)” is a biocompatible, high-strength polymer that is well-suited for use in dental applications due to its unique properties. However, achieving good adhesion between PEEK and hydrophilic materials such as dental adhesives or cement can be challenging. Also, this hydrophobicity may affect the use of PEEK as an implant material. Surface treatment or conditioning is often necessary to improve surface properties. The piranha solution is the treatment of choice to be explored for this purpose. Methods. PEEK disks of 10 mm diameter and 2 mm thickness were used in this study. Those samples were divided into five groups (each group has five samples). The first is the control group, in which no
... Show MoreColloidal silver nanoparticles were prepared by single step green synthesis using aqueous extracts of the leaves of thyme as a function of different molar concentration of AgNO3 (1,2,3,4 mM(. The Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM), UV-Visible and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were used to characterize the resultant AgNPs. The surface Plasmon resonance was observed at wavelength of 444 nm. The four intensive peaks of XRD pattern indicate the crystalline nature and the face centered cubic structure of the AgNPs. The average crystallite size of the AgNPs ranged from 18 to 22 nm. The FESEM image illustrated the well dispersion of the AgNPs and the spherical shape of the nanoparticles with a particle size distribution be
... Show MoreIn the present work, the possibility of treating many types of radioactive sources was examined practically. Six types of sealed radioactive sources were selected: 137Cs, 133Ba, 90Sr, 152Eu, 226Ra, and 241Am. The sources were exposed to a neutron flux emitted from 241Am/Be source for 33 days. The results showed a measurable reduction of activity for 226Ra, 241Am, and 152Eu, while the other radionuclides, 137Cs, 133Ba, and 90Sr, showed less response to neutron incineration.
Clinical keratoconus (KCN) detection is a challenging and time-consuming task. In the diagnosis process, ophthalmologists must revise demographic and clinical ophthalmic examinations. The latter include slit-lamb, corneal topographic maps, and Pentacam indices (PI). We propose an Ensemble of Deep Transfer Learning (EDTL) based on corneal topographic maps. We consider four pretrained networks, SqueezeNet (SqN), AlexNet (AN), ShuffleNet (SfN), and MobileNet-v2 (MN), and fine-tune them on a dataset of KCN and normal cases, each including four topographic maps. We also consider a PI classifier. Then, our EDTL method combines the output probabilities of each of the five classifiers to obtain a decision b
Background: Left ventricular function and volumes have major diagnostic and prognostic importance in patients with various cardiac diseases, such as ischemic heart disease which is a life-threatening heart disease condition characterized by systolic dysfunction and a decrease in cardiac output.
According to left ventricular ejection fraction, the degree of ischemic heart disease was classified as mild, moderate, and severe. To determine cardiac function and hemodynamics, the echocardiography technique is used, which is a noninvasive diagnostic method.
Patients and Methods: The study included 216 patients between 25 and 75 years old; 121 males and 95 females; 265 normal individuals (age range: 25 to 75 years ol
... Show MoreImage is an important digital information that used in many internet of things (IoT) applications such as transport, healthcare, agriculture, military, vehicles and wildlife. etc. Also, any image has very important characteristic such as large size, strong correlation and huge redundancy, therefore, encrypting it by using single key Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) through IoT communication technologies makes it vulnerable to many threats, thus, the pixels that have the same values will be encrypted to another pixels that have same values when they use the same key. The contribution of this work is to increase the security of transferred image. This paper proposed multiple key AES algorithm (MECCAES) to improve the security of the tran
... Show MoreA non-destructive assay (NDA) for radioactive waste drum has been studied
using a local manufacturing gamma scanning system. The gamma system has been
designed and implemented using scanning system contains a high efficiency
portable HPGe detector for characterization and surveying the radioactive waste
drums at Al-Tuwaitha site- Baghdad. To achieve identification with nonhomogenous
radioactive waste drum, six parallel plastic pipes (2cm in diameter)
were inserted inside the cement type Portland contain radioactive sources and
located at different distances from the outer diameter of the drum. The efficiency
calibration is measured by conventional technique, using five miscellaneous radio
nuclides with drum. Th