Fatigue cracking is the most common distress in road pavement. It is mainly due to the increase in the number of load repetition of vehicles, particularly those with high axle loads, and to the environmental conditions. In this study, four-point bending beam fatigue testing has been used for control and modified mixture under various micro strain levels of (250 μƐ, 400 μƐ, and 750 μƐ) and 5HZ. The main objective of the study is to provide a comparative evaluation of pavement resistance to the phenomenon of fatigue cracking between modified asphalt concrete and conventional asphalt concrete mixes (under the influence of three percentage of Silica fumes 1%, 2%, 3% by the weight of asphalt content), and (chan

Background:-The Modified Alvarado Scoring System (MASS) has been reported to be a cheap and quick diagnostic tool in patients with acute appendicitis. However, differences in diagnostic accuracy have been observed if the scores were applied to various populations and clinical settings.
Objectives:- The purpose of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic value of Modified Alvarado Scoring System in patients with acute appendicitis in our setting.
Methods:-one hundre twenty eight patients ,were included in this study, admitted to Al-Kindy teaching hospital from June 2009 to June 2010. Patients’ age ranged from 8 to 56 years (21±10) they were divided into three groups; paediatrics, child bearing age females & adult males,. MAS

     The growing relevance of printed and digitalized hand-written characters has necessitated the need for convalescent automatic recognition of characters in Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Among the handwritten characters, Arabic is one of those with special attention due to its distinctive nature, and the inherent challenges in its recognition systems. This distinctiveness of Arabic characters, with the difference in personal writing styles and proficiency, are complicating the effectiveness of its online handwritten recognition systems. This research, based on limitations and scope of previous related studies, studied the recognition of Arabic isolated characters through the identification o

Credit risk assessment has become an important topic in financial risk administration. Fuzzy clustering analysis has been applied in credit scoring. Gustafson-Kessel (GK) algorithm has been utilised to cluster creditworthy customers as against non-creditworthy ones. A good clustering analysis implemented by good Initial Centres of clusters should be selected. To overcome this problem of Gustafson-Kessel (GK) algorithm, we proposed a modified version of Kohonen Network (KN) algorithm to select the initial centres. Utilising similar degree between points to get similarity density, and then by means of maximum density points selecting; the modified Kohonen Network method generate clustering initial centres to get more reasonable clustering res

Segmentation of real world images considered as one of the most challenging tasks in the computer vision field due to several issues that associated with this kind of images such as high interference between object foreground and background, complicated objects and the pixels intensities of the object and background are almost similar in some cases. This research has introduced a modified adaptive segmentation process with image contrast stretching namely Gamma Stretching to improve the segmentation problem. The iterative segmentation process based on the proposed criteria has given the flexibility to the segmentation process in finding the suitable region of interest. As well as, the using of Gamma stretching will help in separating the

This project sought to fabricate a flexible gas sensor based on a short functionalized multi-walled carbon nanotubes (f-MWCNTs) network for nitrogen dioxide gas detection. The network was prepared by filtration from the suspension (FFS) method and modified by coating with a layer of polypyrrole conductive polymer (PPy) prepared by the oxidative chemical polymerization to improve the properties of the network. The structural, optical, and morphological properties of the f-MWCNTs and f-MWCNTs/PPy network were studied using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourie-transform infrared (FTIR), with an AFM (atomic force microscopy). XRD proved that the structure of f-MWCNTs is unaffected by the synthesis procedure. The FTIR spectra verified the existence o

In this paper, the adsorption behavior of Methylene blue dye by orange peels, which was chemically modified with sodium hydroxide, has been investigated. Physical and chemical properties of both sorbents under study were determined using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrophotometer (FTIR), Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) and Brunauer, Emmett and Teller (BET) specific surface-area measurement techniques. Effect of the solution‒pH, adsorbent dose, adsorption time, temperature and initial methylene blue concentration were studied in batch experiments. The experimental data were fitted into the following kinetic models: pseudo-first order, pseudo-second order, and the intraparticle diffusion model. It was

Permanent deformation, fatigue and thermal cracking are the three typical distresses of flexible pavement. Using hydrated lime (HL) into the conventional limestone mineral additive has been widely practiced, including in Europe, to improve the mechanical properties of hot mix asphalt (HMA) concrete and as the result the durability of the constructed pavement. Large number of experimental studies have been reported to find the optimum addition of HL for the improvement on HMA concrete mechanical properties, moisture susceptibility and fatigue resistance. Pavement in service is under complex thermomechanical stress-strain conditions due to coupled atmospheric and surrounding environment temperature variation and the traffic loading. To predic

This  srudy   aimed  to   use  a   new  concentration   from   l\!J3T (Nitroblue tetrazolium) which using NADH   stain ( by used eight different concentrations from (0.2% to 0.06% ).

That stain is a mitochondrial and cytoplasmic histochemical stain which gi ves more infom1ation about the metabolic activity of muscle fiber, so it is valuable in determining the types of muscle fibers and good fiber differentiation type {T) and type (TT)  fibers), by reducing NBT in the location of enzyme and gives a blue color in different degrees according to the types of muscle fibers, and we noticed that the concentration 0.1% from NBT gives a good result and di