In this study, gold nanoparticles were synthesized in a single step biosynthetic method using aqueous leaves extract of thymus vulgaris L. It acts as a reducing and capping agent. The characterizations of nanoparticles were carried out using UV-Visible spectra, X-ray diffraction (XRD) and FTIR. The surface plasmon resonance of the as-prepared gold nanoparticles (GNPs) showed the surface plasmon resonance centered at 550[Formula: see text]nm. The XRD pattern showed that the strong four intense peaks indicated the crystalline nature and the face centered cubic structure of the gold nanoparticles. The average crystallite size of the AuNPs was 14.93[Formula: see text]nm. Field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) was used to s

The production of power using the process of pressure–retarded osmosis (PRO) has been studied both experimentally and theoretically for simulated sea water vs. river water and deionized water under two cases: the first is for simulated real conditions of sea water and river water and second under low brine solution concentration to examine the full profile of the power- pressure. The influence of concentration polarization (CP) on water flux has been examined as well.

Seepage through earth dams is one of the most popular causes for earth dam collapse due to internal granule movement and seepage transfer. In earthen dams, the core plays a vital function in decreasing seepage through the dam body and lowering the phreatic line. In this research, an alternative soil to the clay soil used in the dam core has been proposed by conducting multiple experiments to test the permeability of silty and sandy soil with different additives materials. Then the selected sandy soil model was used to represent the dam experimentally, employing a permeability device to measure the amount of water that seeps through the dam's body and to represent the seepage line. A numerical model was adopted using Geo-Studio software i

This research aims to investigate and evaluate a reactive powder concrete (RPC) cast using economical materials. Its mechanical properties were investigated and evaluated by studying the effects of using different cement and silica fume contents and locally steel fibers aspect ratios as reinforcement for this concrete. A compressive strength of about 155.2MPa, indirect tensile strength of 16.0MPa, modulus of elasticity of 48.7GPa, flexural strength of 43.5MPa, impact energy of 3294.4kN.m and abrasion loss 0.59%  have been achieved for reinforced RPC contains  910 kg/m³ cement content, silica fume content 185 kg/m³ of cement weight and fiber volume fraction 2%. The water absorption values w

As one type of resistance furnace, the electrical tube furnace (ETF) typically experiences input noise, measurement noise, system uncertainties, unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances, which significantly degrade its temperature control performance. To provide precise, and robust temperature tracking performance for the ETF, a robust composite control (RCC) method is proposed in this paper. The overall RCC method consists of four elements: First, the mathematical model of the ETF system is deduced, then a state feedback control (SFC) is constructed. Third, a novel disturbance observer (DO) is designed to estimate the lumped disturbance with one observer parameter. Moreover, the stability of the closed loop system including controller

In this study, a new technique is considered for solving linear fractional Volterra-Fredholm integro-differential equations (LFVFIDE's) with fractional derivative qualified in the Caputo sense. The method is established in three types of Lagrange polynomials (LP’s), Original Lagrange polynomial (OLP), Barycentric Lagrange polynomial (BLP), and Modified Lagrange polynomial (MLP). General Algorithm is suggested and examples are included to get the best effectiveness, and implementation of these types. Also, as special case fractional differential equation is taken to evaluate the validity of the proposed method. Finally, a comparison between the proposed method and other methods are taken to present the effectiveness of the proposal meth

Data centric techniques, like data aggregation via modified algorithm based on fuzzy clustering algorithm with voronoi diagram which is called modified Voronoi Fuzzy Clustering Algorithm (VFCA) is presented in this paper. In the modified algorithm, the sensed area divided into number of voronoi cells by applying voronoi diagram, these cells are clustered by a fuzzy C-means method (FCM) to reduce the transmission distance. Then an appropriate cluster head (CH) for each cluster is elected. Three parameters are used for this election process, the energy, distance between CH and its neighbor sensors and packet loss values. Furthermore, data aggregation is employed in each CH to reduce the amount of data transmission which le