Polypyrrole/silver (PPy/Ag) nanocomposites was synthesized via a chemical oxidative method. The AFM analysis is performed to study the surface roughness, morphology and size distribution of the PPy particles and PPy-ag nanocomposites. The results indicated that as the concentration of Ag in the nanocomposite increases, the roughness also increases. The size of nanoparticles was also evaluated and found in the range of 15 nm to 125 nm. The PPy/Ag nanocomposites exhibited an effectiveness against Gram-negative Escherichia coli showing an inhibition zone of 4mm and displayed poor efficacy against Gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus. Based on given adequate antibacterial characteristics of PPy/Ag nanocomposites, it can be identified as a pro

Dairy wastewater generally contains fats, lactose, whey proteins, and nutrients. Casein precipitation causes the effluent to decompose into a dark, strong-smelling sludge. Fluid waste contains soluble organic matter, suspended solids, and gaseous organic matter, which cause undesirable taste and smell, grant tone and turbidity, and advance eutrophication, which plays an essential role in increasing biological oxygen demand (BOD) in water. It also contains detergents and disinfecting agents from the rinses and washing processes, which increase the need for chemical oxygen (COD). One of the characteristics of dairy effluents is their relatively high temperature, high organic contents, and wide pH range, so the discharge of wastewater into

This paper presents a new algorithm in an important research field which is the semantic word similarity estimation. A new feature-based algorithm is proposed for measuring the word semantic similarity for the Arabic language. It is a highly systematic language where its words exhibit elegant and rigorous logic. The score of sematic similarity between two Arabic words is calculated as a function of their common and total taxonomical features. An Arabic knowledge source is employed for extracting the taxonomical features as a set of all concepts that subsumed the concepts containing the compared words. The previously developed Arabic word benchmark datasets are used for optimizing and evaluating the proposed algorithm. In this paper,

     Binary relations or interactions among bio-entities, such as proteins, set up the essential part of any living biological system. Protein-protein interactions are usually structured in a graph data structure called "protein-protein interaction networks" (PPINs). Analysis of PPINs into complexes tries to lay out the significant knowledge needed to answer many unresolved questions, including how cells are organized and how proteins work. However, complex detection problems fall under the category of non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-Hard) problems due to their computational complexity. To accommodate such combinatorial explosions, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are proven effective alternatives to heuristics in solvin

Cancer is in general not a result of an abnormality of a single gene but a consequence of changes in many genes, it is therefore of great importance to understand the roles of different oncogenic and tumor suppressor pathways in tumorigenesis. In recent years, there have been many computational models developed to study the genetic alterations of different pathways in the evolutionary process of cancer. However, most of the methods are knowledge-based enrichment analyses and inflexible to analyze user-defined pathways or gene sets. In this paper, we develop a nonparametric and data-driven approach to testing for the dynamic changes of pathways over the cancer progression. Our method is based on an expansion and refinement of the pathway bei

      Products’ quality inspection is an important stage in every production route, in which the quality of the produced goods is estimated and compared with the desired specifications. With traditional inspection, the process rely on manual methods that generates various costs and large time consumption. On the contrary, today’s inspection systems that use modern techniques like computer vision, are more accurate and efficient. However, the amount of work needed to build a computer vision system based on classic techniques is relatively large, due to the issue of manually selecting and extracting features from digital images, which also produces labor costs for the system engineers.       In this research, we pr

In this paper a new structure for the AVR of the power system exciter is proposed and designed using digital-based LQR. With two weighting matrices R and Q,  this method produces an optimal regulator that is used to generate the feedback control law. These matrices are called state and control weighting matrices and are used to balance between the relative importance of the input and the states in the cost function that is being optimized. A sample power system composed of single machine connected to an infinite- bus bar (SMIB) with both a conventional and a proposed Digital AVR (DAVR) is simulated. Evaluation results show that the DAVR damps well the oscillations of the terminal voltage and presents a faster respo