Background: Oil refinery workers are continuously exposed to numerous hazardous materials. Petroleum contains the heavy metals as a natural constituent or as additives. These metals induce the production of ROS which associated with an oxidative damage to DNA, proteins, and lipids. This study was conducted to assess the salivary levels of heavy metals, salivary oxidative status, oral immunological activity (salivary sIgA) and assessment of the oral findings among the workers of Al-Daura oil refinery in Baghdad city. Subjects, Materials and Methods: This study was done in Al-Daura oil refinery; samples consist of 60 workers involved in refinery processes (study group) and 20 non-workers (control group). Oral examination and saliva collection was done to assess the oral findings and measurement the level of heavy metals (lead and cadmium), oxidative status (MDA and SOD) and secretary IgA. Results: salivary lead and cadmium was higher in study group (6.34 µg/dl and 0.56 µg/l) than that of control group (3.3 µg/dl and 0.34 µg/l) with highly significant difference (p<0.001). A significant increase (p<0.05) was found in salivary MDA (15.3 ng/ml) and salivary sIgA (464.36 µg/ml) and significant decrease in salivary SOD (1895.1 pg/ml) among the study group. Lead has shown significant linear correlation with MDA and IgA. A significant reverse correlation was found between heavy metals (lead and cadmium) and SOD. The oral examination revealed no oral lesions of interest. Conclusion: Workers in Al- Daura oil refinery exposed to pollution with heavy metals (Pb and Cd) which was associated with changes in the biochemical and immunological findings among the oral cavity.
In this work, strains and dynamic crack growth were studied and analyzed in thin flat plate with a surface crack at the center, subjected to cycling low velocity impact loading for two types of aluminum plates (2024, 6061). Experimental and numerical methods were implemented to achieve this research. Numerical analysis using program (ANSYS11-APDL) based on finite element method used to analysis the strains with respect to time at crack tip and then find the velocity of the crack growth under cycling impact loading. In the experimental work, a rig was designed and manufactured to applying the cycling impact loading on the cracked specimens. The grid points was screened in front of the crack tip to measure the elastic-plas
... Show MoreSensing insole systems are a promising technology for various applications in healthcare and sports. They can provide valuable information about the foot pressure distribution and gait patterns of different individuals. However, designing and implementing such systems poses several challenges, such as sensor selection, calibration, data processing, and interpretation. This paper proposes a sensing insole system that uses force-sensitive resistors (FSRs) to measure the pressure exerted by the foot on different regions of the insole. This system classifies four types of foot deformities: normal, flat, over-pronation, and excessive supination. The classification stage uses the differential values of pressure points as input for a feedforwar
... Show MoreThe issue of penalized regression model has received considerable critical attention to variable selection. It plays an essential role in dealing with high dimensional data. Arctangent denoted by the Atan penalty has been used in both estimation and variable selection as an efficient method recently. However, the Atan penalty is very sensitive to outliers in response to variables or heavy-tailed error distribution. While the least absolute deviation is a good method to get robustness in regression estimation. The specific objective of this research is to propose a robust Atan estimator from combining these two ideas at once. Simulation experiments and real data applications show that the p
... Show MoreThe present study focused mainly on the buckling behavior of composite laminated plates subjected to mechanical loads. Mechanical loads are analyzed by experimental analysis, analytical analysis (for laminates without cutouts) and numerical analysis by finite element method (for laminates with and without cutouts) for different type of loads which could be uniform or non-uniform, uniaxial or biaxial. In addition to many design parameters of the laminates such as aspect ratio, thickness ratio, and lamination angle or the parameters of the cutout such as shape, size, position, direction, and radii rounding) which are changed to studytheir effects on the buckling characteristics with various boundary conditions. Levy method of classical lam
... Show MoreIn this work, the switching nonlinear dynamics of a Fabry-Perot etalon are studied. The method used to complete the solution of the differential equations for the nonlinear medium. The Debye relaxation equations solved numerically to predict the behavior of the cavity for modulated input power. The response of the cavity filled with materials of different response time is depicted. For a material with a response time equal to = 50 ns, the cavity switches after about (100 ns). Notice that there is always a finite time delay before the cavity switches. The switch up time is much longer than the cavity build-up time of the corresponding linear cavity which was found to be of the order of a few round-trip ti
... Show MoreAs one type of heating furnaces, the electric heating furnace (EHF) typically suffers from time delay, non-linearity, time-varying parameters, system uncertainties, and harsh en-vironment of the furnace, which significantly deteriorate the temperature control process of the EHF system. In order to achieve accurate and robust temperature tracking performance, an integration of robust state feedback control (RSFC) and a novel sliding mode-based disturbance observer (SMDO) is proposed in this paper, where modeling errors and external disturbances are lumped as a lumped disturbance. To describe the characteristics of the EHF, by using convection laws, an integrated dynamic model is established and identified as an uncertain nonlinear second ord
... Show MoreIn this paper a new structure for the AVR of the power system exciter is proposed and designed using digital-based LQR. With two weighting matrices R and Q, this method produces an optimal regulator that is used to generate the feedback control law. These matrices are called state and control weighting matrices and are used to balance between the relative importance of the input and the states in the cost function that is being optimized. A sample power system composed of single machine connected to an infinite- bus bar (SMIB) with both a conventional and a proposed Digital AVR (DAVR) is simulated. Evaluation results show that the DAVR damps well the oscillations of the terminal voltage and presents a faster respo
... Show MoreSpent hydrodesulfurization (Co-Mo/γ-Al2O3) catalyst generally contains valuable metals like molybdenum (Mo), cobalt (Co), aluminium (Al) on a supporting material, such as γ-Al2O3. In the present study, a two stages alkali/acid leaching process was conducted to study leaching of cobalt, molybdenum and aluminium from Co-Mo/γ-Al2O3 catalyst. The acid leaching of spent catalyst, previously treated by alkali solution to remove molybdenum, yielded a solution rich in cobalt and aluminium.