PVA, Starch/PVA, and Starch/PVA/sugar samples of different
concentrations (10, 20, 30 and 40 % wt/wt) were prepared by casting
method. DSC analysis was carried; the results showed only one glass
transition temperature (Tg) for the samples involved, which suggest
that starch/PVA and starch/PVA/sugar blends are miscible. The
miscibility is attributed to the hydrogen bonds between PVA and
starch. This is in a good agreement with (FTIR) results. Tg and Tm
decrease with starch and sugar content compared with that for
(PVA). Systematic decrease in ultimate strength, due to starch and
sugar ratio increase, is attributed to (PVA), which has more hydroxyl
groups that made its ultimate strength higher than that for
starch/PVA, and starch/PVA/sugar blends. It is observed from water
uptake tests that the solubility time decreases with starch ratio; it is
attributed to decrease in hydroxyl groups caused by PVA ratio
decrease. The inter- and inter-molecular bonds of the hydroxyl
groups enhanced the solubility process of the starch/PVA blends in
water. The water immersion causes hydrogen bonds (inter and
intermolecular bonds) to decompose, that increases the film
solubility. Water absorption and capacity of degradability are most
important in biodegradable materials. The results suggest the samples
that have undergone investigation, can be used for shopping, and
food packaging.
The study of soil burial for the sample at (3cm) depth, and at (13cm)
depth has exhibited weight loss increase with soil burial time. The
biodegradability rapidly increases at the first (6-7) weeks; it is found
that the weight loss at (3cm) depth is greater than that at (13cm) that
was attributed to the differences in the availability of oxygen ratio. It
is found that PVA undergoes lowest weight loss, the weight loss
changes with starch, and sugar content. In dry soil, the weight loss is
lower. The results proved that the biodegradation decreases with soil
burial time after seven weeks of burial. It is concluded that the
samples involved are biodegradable material that can be used for
packaging applications and biologically friendly synthetic polymer
blends to solve the solid waste accumulation problem.
Non-thermal argon plasma needle at atmospheric pressure was
constructed. The experimental setup was based on a simple and low
cost electric component that generates a sufficiently high electric
field at the electrodes to ionize the argon gas which flow at
atmospheric pressure. A high AC power supply was used with 1.1
kV and 19.57 kHz. Non-thermal Argon plasma used on blood
samples to show the ability of non-thermal plasma to promote blood
coagulation. Three tests have been done to show the ability of plasma
to coagulate both normal and anti-coagulant blood. Each blood
sample has been treated for varying time from 20sec. to 180sec. at
different distances. The results of the current study showed that the
co
Background: The presence of cancer has a profound psychological impact on the quality of life of patients and their families, on family and social relationships, and on role functioning.
Aim of the study: Assess the impact of childhood cancer on patients and their families.
Subjects and methods: A Prospective questionnaire-based study, for 151 patients, had malignancy identified by tumor registry of Children Welfare Teaching Hospital. The information was taken from the parent(s) in the presence of the patient who sometimes answered some questions during the interview.
Result: There was an interview with 151 families of children with cancer in t
... Show MorePhotonic Crystal Fiber Interferometers (PCFIs) are greatly used
for sensing applications. This work presents the fabrication and
characterization of a relative humidity sensor based on Mach-
Zehnder Interferometer (MZI), which operates in reflection mode.
The humidity sensor operation based on the adsorption and
desorption of water vapour at the silica-air interface within the PCF.
The fabrication of this sensor is simple, it only includes splicing and
cleaving the PCF with SMF.PCF (LMA-10) with a certain length
spliced to SMF (Corning-28).
The spectrum of PCFI exhibits good sensitivity to humidity
variations. The PCFI response is observed for a range of humidity
values from (27% RH to 85% RH), the positi
Orthogonal polynomials and their moments serve as pivotal elements across various fields. Discrete Krawtchouk polynomials (DKraPs) are considered a versatile family of orthogonal polynomials and are widely used in different fields such as probability theory, signal processing, digital communications, and image processing. Various recurrence algorithms have been proposed so far to address the challenge of numerical instability for large values of orders and signal sizes. The computation of DKraP coefficients was typically computed using sequential algorithms, which are computationally extensive for large order values and polynomial sizes. To this end, this paper introduces a computationally efficient solution that utilizes the parall
... Show MoreFacial emotion recognition finds many real applications in the daily life like human robot interaction, eLearning, healthcare, customer services etc. The task of facial emotion recognition is not easy due to the difficulty in determining the effective feature set that can recognize the emotion conveyed within the facial expression accurately. Graph mining techniques are exploited in this paper to solve facial emotion recognition problem. After determining positions of facial landmarks in face region, twelve different graphs are constructed using four facial components to serve as a source for sub-graphs mining stage using gSpan algorithm. In each group, the discriminative set of sub-graphs are selected and fed to Deep Belief Network (DBN) f
... Show MoreTwo hundred fifty mid-stream urine specimens were collected from Baqubah Teaching Hospital and Al-Batool Teaching Hospital from patients with urinary tract infections (UTI). Of these investigated urine specimens, 66 (26.4%) specimens showed positive growth culture of Gram-negative bacteria. From these, Escherichia coli was the most prevalent bacteria of the examined culture (41, 62.12%). Additionally, the cup assay was used to determine colicin producers while the most efficient colicin producers were estimated by the formation of larger inhibition zone. Approximately half of the investigated E. coli isolates (20, 49 %) was colicin producers. Colicins was extracted after induction by mitomycin-C showed a concentration o
... Show MoreEarthquakes occur on faults and create new faults. They also occur on normal, reverse and strike-slip faults. The aim of this work is to suggest a new unified classification of Shallow depth earthquakes based on the faulting styles, and to characterize each class. The characterization criteria include the maximum magnitude, focal depth, b-constant value, return period and relations between magnitude, focal depth and dip of fault plane. Global Centroid Moment Tensor (GCMT) catalog is the source of the used data. This catalog covers the period from Jan.1976 to Dec. 2017. We selected only the shallow (depth less than 70kms) pure, normal, strike-slip and reverse earthquakes (magnitude ≥ 5) and excluded the oblique earthquakes. Th
... Show MoreBromelain is a proteolytic enzyme rich in cysteine proteases, extracted from the stem and fruit of pineapple (Ananas comosus). There are several therapeutic applications of the bromelain enzyme, where it has anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, and antimicrobial activity, reduces joint pain, and accelerates wound healing. In the current study, bromelain enzyme was loaded on silver nanoparticles (Br-AgNPs) prepared using the citrate-reduction Turkevich method. Different characterization analyses were performed, including UV-Vis spectrophotometers, FTIR, SEM, and XRD analyses. Moreover, the antioxidant activity of prepared Br-AgNPs was evaluated by DPPH assay. The results of UV-Vis showed a peak at 434 nm, which referred to the AgNPs f
... Show MoreIn this paper the definition of fuzzy normed space is recalled and its basic properties. Then the definition of fuzzy compact operator from fuzzy normed space into another fuzzy normed space is introduced after that the proof of an operator is fuzzy compact if and only if the image of any fuzzy bounded sequence contains a convergent subsequence is given. At this point the basic properties of the vector space FC(V,U)of all fuzzy compact linear operators are investigated such as when U is complete and the sequence ( ) of fuzzy compact operators converges to an operator T then T must be fuzzy compact. Furthermore we see that when T is a fuzzy compact operator and S is a fuzzy bounded operator then the composition TS and ST are fuzzy compact
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