For over a century, the global consumption of asphalt binder in asphalt mixture production has been substantial. In the Heet region (west of Iraq), two distinct forms of natural asphalt (NA) deposits exist: rock asphalt and sulfur spring asphalt. This study focused on using NA sourced from sulfur springs. The aim was to investigate the potential of incorporating NA into local asphalt mixtures. To achieve this, NA was heated to 163°C for varying durations. After heat treatment, laboratory tests were conducted on NA. The findings suggest that by heating NA for 20 hours, it conforms to Iraqi specifications in terms of physical properties. Furthermore, compared to conventional petroleum asphalt, treated NA showed greater

To achieve sustainability in the field of civil engineering, there has become a great interest in developing reactive powder concrete RPC through the use of environmentally friendly materials to reduce the release of CO₂ gas produced from cement factories as well as contribute to the recycling of industrial wastes that have a great impact on environmental pollution.

In this study, reactive powder concrete was prepared using total binder content of 800 kg/m³, water to binder ratio (0.275), and micro steel fibers  1% by volume of concrete. The experimental program included replacing fly ash with (8, 12, 16) % by cement weight to find the optimal ratio, which achieved the best mechanical proper

The present work aimed to study the SiO2μPs, and NPs effect on the biodegradability of St/PVA blends. The samples were prepared by casting method as PVA, St/PVA blends with different concentrations (30, 40, 50, and 60 %). FTIR test was carried out for the samples preparation. The results proved some changes which might be related to changing in crystallinity of St/PVA matrix as well as physical incorporation of SiO2 μPs, and NPs addition. The enzymatic test and water uptake results proved that increase in weight loss with increases of starch ratio. The lowest weight loss was PVA; the highest weight loss is 60% St/PVA whereas the lowest weight loss is 30%St/PVA for blends involved. SiO2μPs (753.7 nm), and NPs (263.1 nm) were added at d

In the spreading of the Internet, mobile smart devices, and interactive websites such as YouTube, the educational video becomes more widespread and deliberative among users. The reasons for its spread are the prevalence of technologies, cheap cost, and easy to use. However, these products often lack to the distinction in video production. By following videos of an educational channel on YouTube, some comments found to discuss the lack of the content presented to motivate the learners, which lead to reduce the viewers of the videos. Therefore, there is an important decision to find general standards for the design and production of educational videos. A list of standards has been drawn up to help those interested in producing educational

Data steganography is a technique used to hide data, secret message, within another data, cover carrier. It is considered as a part of information security. Audio steganography is a type of data steganography, where the secret message is hidden in audio carrier. This paper proposes an efficient audio steganography method that uses LSB technique. The proposed method enhances steganography performance by exploiting all carrier samples and balancing between hiding capacity and distortion ratio. It suggests an adaptive number of hiding bits for each audio sample depending on the secret message size, the cover carrier size, and the signal to noise ratio (SNR). Comparison results show that the proposed method outperforms state of the art methods

Abstract

 The objective of image fusion is to merge multiple sources of images together in such a way that the final representation contains higher amount of useful information than any input one.. In this paper, a weighted average fusion method is proposed. It depends on using weights that are extracted from source images using counterlet transform. The extraction method is done by making the approximated transformed coefficients equal to zero, then taking the inverse counterlet transform to get the details of the images to be fused. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been verified on several grey scale and color test  images, and compared with some present methods.

Most cultivars of sorghum have low field emergence as common problem. Three experiments were carried out at Agriculture College, Baghdad University. First experiment was conducted in laboratory according to Complete Randomized Design (CRD) with four replicates. Second and third experiments were conducted at field according to Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) during the spring and the fall seasons of 2015, respectively, with four replicates for each one. Same two factors were studied at each experiment. First factor was seed priming by seed soaking for 10 hours in distilled water, solvents of GA3, KCl and thiamine (300, 40 and 30 mg*L-1, respectively) and non-primed seed. Second factor was three cultivars of sorghum (Inqath, Kafier an

In this paper We introduce some new types of almost bi-periodic points in topological bitransfprmation groups and thier effects on some types of minimaliy in topological dynamics

This paper presents a numerical analysis using ANSYS finite element program to simulate the reinforced concrete slabs with spherical voids. Six full-scale one way bubbled slabs of (3000mm) length with rectangular cross-sectional area of (460mm) width and (150mm) depth are tested as simply supported under two-concentrated load. The results of the finite element model are presented and compared with the experimental data of the tested slabs. Material nonlinearities due to cracking and crushing of concrete and yielding of reinforcement are considered. The general behavior of the finite element models represented by the load-deflection curves at midspan, crack pattern, ultimate load, load-concrete strain curves and failure m