This study investigated the feasibility of anaerobic co-digestion of giant reed (GR) inoculated with waste manure as a co-substrate for biogas production. The performance of co-digestion was evaluated in 4 anaerobic digesters operated in batch mode at different conditions. The effects of alkali pretreatment with NaOH (4% w/v) solution, inoculum type, and thermal condition were studied. The results demonstrated that the alkali-pretreatment of GR enhanced the biogas generation by about 15% at mesophilic conditions. Thermophilic conditions enhanced the biogas recovery from both alkali-free and alkali pretreated GR by 15% and 127%, respectively. The kinetic study of the co-digestion process of GR for biogas recovery suggeste

The study is devoted to both static and earthquake response analysis of retaining structures acted upon by lateral earth pressure. Two main approaches were implemented in the analysis, namely, the Mononobe-Okabe analytical method and the numerical Finite element procedure as provided in the ready software ABAQUS with explicit dynamic method. A basic case study considered in the present work is the bridge approach retaining walls as a part of AL-Jadiriya bridge intersection to obtain the effects of the backfill and the ground water on the retaining wall response including displacement of the retaining structure in addition to the behavior of the fill material. Parametric studies were carried out to evaluate the effects of several factors

Specialized hardware implementations of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) can offer faster execution than general-purpose microprocessors by taking advantage of reusable modules, parallel processes and specialized computational components. Modern high-density Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer the required flexibility and fast design-to-implementation time with the possibility of exploiting highly parallel computations like those required by ANNs in hardware. The bounded width of the data in FPGA ANNs will add an additional error to the result of the output. This paper derives the equations of the additional error value that generate from bounded width of the data and proposed a method to reduce the effect of the error to give

The effect of mixed corrosion inhibitors in cooling system was evaluated by using carbon steel specimens and weight loss analysis. The carbon steel specimens immersed in mixture of sodium phosphate (Na₂ HPO₄) used as corrosion inhibitor and sodium glocunate (C₆ H₁₁ NaO₇) as a scale dispersant at different concentrations (20,40, 60, 80 ppm) and at different temperature (25,50,75 and 100)ºC for (1-5) days. The corrosion inhibitors efficiency was calculated by using uninhibited and inhibited water to give 98.1%. The result of these investigations indicate that the corrosion rate decreases with the increase the corrosion inhibitors concentration at 80 ppm and at 100ºC for 5 days, (i.e,

The present study was included the isolation of Keratinophilic fungi from water samples taken from 19 indoor public swimming pools in Baghdad during four season (summer ,fall ,spring ,and winter). Isolation period was September 2011and September 2012 . Samples were collected from different places in swimming pool . Sixteen keratinophilic fungal species, belonging to twenty –one genera were isolated using Surface Dilution Plating (SDP) and Hair Bait Technique (HBT) . Aspergillus genus was the most frequent and occurrence (19.84%), followed by Trichophyton (11.60%) and Fusarium (7.59% ) . The most common fungal infection occurred in summer season (42.16%) , and the most frequent month manifestation of species occurred in August