Colloidal crystals (opals) made of close-packed polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) were fabricated and grown by Template-Directed methods to obtain porous materials with well-ordered periodicity and interconnected pore systems to manufacture photonic crystals. Opals were made from aqueous suspensions of monodisperse PMMA spheres with diameters between 280 and 415 nm. SEM confirmed the PMMA spheres crystallized uniformly in a face-centered cubic (FCC) array. Optical properties of synthesized pores PMMA were characterized by UV–Visible spectroscopy. It shows that the colloidal crystals possess pseudo photonic band gaps in the visible region. A combination of Bragg’s law of diffraction and Snell’s law of refraction were used to calculate t

Polyaniline (PANI) and Ag/PANI nanocomposite thin films have prepared by microwave induced plasma. The Ag powder of average particle size of 50 nm, were used to prepare Ag/PANI nanocomposite thin films. The Ag/PANI nanocomposite thin films prepared by polymerization in plasma and characterized by UV-VIS, FTIR, AFM and SEM to study the effect of silver nanoparticles on the optical properties, morphology and structure of the thin films. The optical properties studies showed that the energy band gap of the Ag/PANI (5%wt silver) decreased from 3.6 to 3.2 eV, where the substrate location varied from 4.4 to 3.4 cm from the axis of the cylindrical plasma chamber. Also the optical energy gap decreased systematically from 3.3 to 3 eV with increas

The pervaporation using a commercial hydrophilic ceramic membrane supplied from PERVATECH was conducted. The dehydration of ethanol/ water system was used as a model for the pervaporation study. Pervaporation experiments of ethanol/water system were carried out in the temperature range of 303-343K, ethanol concentration in the feed 10-90 vol. % and the feed flow rate in the range of 0.5-10 L/min.  In this work, the effect of operation parameters on permeates fluxes as well as permeates separation factors have been studied. The Water flux is strongly dependent on the temperature; it increased with increasing in temperature, which in turn decreased the selectivity of membrane to water molecules.

In addition water flux was decr

Zinc Oxide (ZnO) is considered as one of the best materials already used as a window layer in solar cells due to its antireflective capability. The ZnO/MgF2 bilayer thin film is more efficient as antireflective coating. In this work, ZnO and ZnO/MgF2 thin films were deposited on glass substrate using pulsed laser deposition and thermal evaporation deposition methods. The optical measurements indicated that ZnO thin layer has an energy gap of (3.02 eV) while ZnO/MgF2 bilayer gives rise to an increase in the energy gap. ZnO/MgF2 bilayer shows a high energy gap (3.77 eV) with low reflectance (1.1-10 %) and refractive index (1.9) leading to high transmittance, this bilayer could be a good candidate optical material to improve the performance

Objective: To assess the nutritional status of hemodialysis patients.
Methodology: A descriptive quantitative cross sectional study was effectuated in hemodialysis centers from
February 2011 to September 2011. A purposive "non-probability" sample of (70) male and female hemodialysis
patients in al-Najaf al-Ashraf Governorate from those who have spent more than six months on maintenance
hemodialysis schedule. Data collected through using of a well-designed questionnaire consist of five parts, part
one consists of sociodemographic contain (9) items, and part two consists of medical data contain (8) items, and
part three consists of health and nutrition behavior contain (12) items plus (8) items of anthropometric
measur

Ultrasound has been used as a diagnostic modality for many intraocular diseases, due its safety, low cost, real time and wide availability. Unfortunately, ultrasound images suffer from speckle artifact that are tissue dependent. In this work, we will offer a method to reduce speckle noise and improve ultrasound image to raise the human diagnostic performance. This method combined undecimated wavelet transform with a wavelet coefficient mapping function: where UDWT used to eliminate the noise and a wavelet coefficient mapping function used to enhance the contrast of denoised images obtained from the first component. This methods can be used not only as a means for improving visual quality of medical images but also as a preprocessing