The growing demand for sustainable and high-performance asphalt binders has prompted the exploration of waste-derived modifiers. This study investigates the performance enhancement of Natural Asphalt (NA) using Sugarcane Molasses (SM) and Waste Engine Oil (WEO). The modified blends were prepared by partially replacing 50 % NA with varying proportions of SM and WEO ranging from 10 % to 40 % of the total weight of NA. Comprehensive testing was conducted, including penetration, softening point, ductility, viscosity, Bending Beam Rheometer (BBR), Multiple Stress Creep Recovery (MSCR), Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDX), Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). The results demonstrated that modified blends with a high WEO content significantly increased fluidity, reducing rotational viscosity by up to 91 % for the blend with 40 % WEO and 10 % SM at 135 ◦C. Conversely, higher SM content increased stiffness, as seen in the blend with 40 % SM and 10 % WEO, with penetration values rising by 305 % compared to unmodified NA. Rheological testing showed that the 40 % SM and 10 % WEO blend achieved the highest rutting resistance with a Performance Grade (PG) of 88 ◦C, while the 40 % WEO and 10 % SM blend exhibited the best fatigue resistance with a 55 % reduction in G* .sinδ. Low-temperature performance was significantly improved across all blends, with the 40 % WEO and 10 % SM blend achieving the lowest creep stiffness and highest m-value, ensuring superior thermal cracking resistance. Chemical analysis revealed increased oxygen content (18.6 %) and reduced sulfur content (60 %) in the 40 % SM and 10 % WEO blend, indicating enhanced oxidation resistance. SEM analysis confirmed the development of dense morphology in the 40 % SM and 10 % WEO blend, correlating with superior structural integrity. Grey decision analysis identified the 40 % SM and 10 % WEO blend as the optimal blend with the lowest bull’s-eye distance, reflecting balanced performance across all parameters. These findings highlight the complementary effects of SM and WEO in enhancing the performance of NA, with the 40 % SM and 10 % WEO blend emerging as the most promising blend for bio-asphalt applications.
A new pavement technology has been developed in Highway engineering: asphalt pavement production is less susceptible to oxidation and the consequent damages. The warm mix asphalt (WMA) is produced at a temperature of about (10-40) oC lower than the hot asphalt paving. This is done using one of the methods of producing a WMA. Although WMA's performance is rather good, according to previous studies, as it is less susceptible to oxidation, it is possible to modify some of its properties using different materials, including polymers. Waste tires of vehicles are one of the types of polymers because of their flexible properties. The production of HMA, WMA, and WMA modified with proportions of (1, 1.5, and 2%) of rub
... Show MorePermanent 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
... Show MoreThe porosity of materials is important in many applications, products and processes, such as electrochemical devices (electrodes, separator, active components in batteries), porous thin film, ceramics, soils, construction materials, ..etc. This can be characterized in many different methods, and the most important methods for industrial purposes are the N2 gas adsorption and mercury porosimetry. In the present paper, both of these techniques have been used to characterize some of Iraqi natural raw materials deposits. These are Glass Sand, Standard Sand, Flint Clay and Bentonite. Data from both analyses on the different types of natural raw materials deposits are critically examined and discussed. The results of specific surface are
... Show MoreA survey and revised checklist of the species belonging to the family of Compositae for the specimens which are collected and deposited previously at the herbarium of the Iraq Natural History Research Center and Museum, in addition to the current specimens collected for the period 2016-2021. A total of 85 species belonging to 49 genera and 16 tribes are revised with their synonyms, locality, and distributions, flowering and fruiting period.
As an alternative to Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC), the alkali-activated binders have been developed with better technical characteristics and more extended durability. The Alkali-Activated Iraqi Natural Pozzolans (AANP) could produce geopolymer cementation building materials and make them ecologically acceptable. The primary advantage of geopolymer cement is that it has a lower environmental effect that contributes to it. The engineering characteristics of geopolymer concrete produced using activated Iraqi natural Pozzolan are summarized in this research. The mechanical properties, modulus of elasticity, and ultrasonic pulse velocity of various concrete mixes were determined via exp
As an alternative to Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC), the alkali-activated binders have been developed with better technical characteristics and more extended durability. The Alkali-Activated Iraqi Natural Pozzolans (AANP) could produce geopolymer cementation building materials and make them ecologically acceptable. The primary advantage of geopolymer cement is that it has a lower environmental effect that contributes to it. The engineering characteristics of geopolymer concrete produced using activated Iraqi natural Pozzolan are summarized in this research. The mechanical properties, modulus of elasticity, and ultrasonic pulse velocity of various concrete mixes were determined via experimental study. The impact of essential variables like w
... Show MoreWeb testing is very important method for users and developers because it gives the ability to detect errors in applications and check their quality to perform services to users performance abilities, user interface, security and other different types of web testing that may occur in web application. This paper focuses on a major branch of the performance testing, which is called the load testing. Load testing depends on an important elements called request time and response time. From these elements, it can be decided if the performance time of a web application is good or not. In the experimental results, the load testing applied on the website (http://ihcoedu.uobaghdad.edu.iq) the main home page and all the science departments pages. In t
... Show MoreIn aspect-based sentiment analysis ABSA, implicit aspects extraction is a fine-grained task aim for extracting the hidden aspect in the in-context meaning of the online reviews. Previous methods have shown that handcrafted rules interpolated in neural network architecture are a promising method for this task. In this work, we reduced the needs for the crafted rules that wastefully must be articulated for the new training domains or text data, instead proposing a new architecture relied on the multi-label neural learning. The key idea is to attain the semantic regularities of the explicit and implicit aspects using vectors of word embeddings and interpolate that as a front layer in the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Bi-LSTM. First, we
... Show MoreE. coli was isolated, and it was Gram-negative rod bacteria that was colony circular, regular edged, thick somewhat glitter and viscous(less). It was lactose fermenter bacteria and belongs the family of Enterobacteriaceae. E. coli showed sensitivity to all used antibiotics except Erythromycin (E), Cloxacellin (CX), Rifampin (RA), Cephalothin (KF), Ampicillin (AM), and Penicillin (P). The experimental results of antibiotic sensitivity of E. coli in media containing different concentrations of omeprazole, a proton pump inhibitor, showed an enhancement of resistance by decreasing the sensitivity of E. coli inversely with drug concentration against the antibiotics that E. coli was sensitive to. It seems that omeprazole changed cell mem
... Show MoreThe major of DDoS attacks use TCP protocol and the TCP SYN flooding attack is the most common one among them. The SYN Cookie mechanism is used to defend against the TCP SYN flooding attack. It is an effective defense, but it has a disadvantage of high calculations and it doesn’t differentiate spoofed packets from legitimate packets. Therefore, filtering the spoofed packet can effectively enhance the SYN Cookie activity. Hop Count Filtering (HCF) is another mechanism used at the server side to filter spoofed packets. This mechanism has a drawback of being not a perfect and final solution in defending against the TCP SYN flooding attack. An enhanced mechanism of Integrating and combining the SYN Cookie with Hop Count Filtering (HCF) mech
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