Fabrication of porous clay refractory insulating specimens from Iraqi kaolin with different percentage of Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) waste crumbs additions were investigated. After mixing and forming by hand molding, the specimens was dried and fired at 1300 oC. The structural, physical, mechanical and thermal properties of the refractory insulating products were measured. Maximum addition of EPS (1.25 wt%) lead to reduce the linear shrinkage to less than 1.7% and increased apparent porosity up to 50 %. As well as, the density, Modulus of rupture and thermal conductivity were reduced to 1.39 g/cm3, 4.1 MPa and 0.21 W/m.K, respectively. The final outcome, addition of EPS showed good results in the formation of pores without distorting the

Adsorption studies were performed at different initial Tetracycline (TC) and Amoxicillin (AMO) concentration, different biomass dosage and type, contact time, agitation speed, and initial pH.  In the batch mode were investigated. The optimum pH of solutions is 6.5 for TC and 5 for AMO, agitation speed 200 rpm and concentration 50 ppm. The results in FTIR showed that there were -OH and amides (N-H) and other functional groups on the surface of Cladophora and Spirulina algae. The equilibrium isotherm data were modeled with Freundlich, Temkin, and Langmuir isotherm models. The data best fitted with the Langmuir model. The maximal adsorption capacity from the Langmuir model was (9.86, 20. 5 mg/g) for TC and (7.89, 17.4 mg/g) for AMO on

Due to the deliberate disposal of industrial waste, a great amount of petroleum hydrocarbons pollute the soil and aquatic environments. Bioremediation that depends on the microorganisms in the removal of pollutants is more efficient and cost-effective technology. In this study, five rhizobacteria were isolated from Phragmites australis roots and exposed to real wastewater from Al-Daura refinery with 70 mg/L total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) concentration. The five selected rhizobacteria were examined in a biodegradation test for seven days to remove TPH. The results showed that 80% TPH degradation as the maximum value by Sphingomonas Paucimobilis as identified with Vitek® 2 Compact (France).

Each organization struggles to exploit each possible opportunity for gaining success and continuing with its work carrier. In this field, organization success can be concluded by fulfilling end user requirements combined with optimizing available resources usage within a specified time and acceptable quality level to gain maximum profit. The project ranking process is governed by the multi-criteria environment, which is more difficult for the governmental organization because other organizations' main target is maximizing profit constrained with available resources. The governmental organization should consider human, social, economic and many more factors. This paper focused on building a multi-criteria optimizing proje

A reduced-order extended state observer (RESO) based a continuous sliding mode control (SMC) is proposed in this paper for the tracking problem of high order Brunovsky systems with the existence of external perturbations and system uncertainties. For this purpose, a composite control is constituted by two consecutive steps. First, the reduced-order ESO (RESO) technique is designed to estimate unknown system states and total disturbance without estimating an available state. Second, the continuous SMC law is designed based on the estimations supplied by the RESO estimator in order to govern the nominal system part. More importantly, the robustness performance is well achieved by compensating not only the lumped disturbance, but also its esti

The most prevalent chronic complication of diabetes mellitus is diabetic neuropathy. The pathogenesis of diabetic neuropathy is exacerbated by hyperglycemia-induced oxidative stress, which causes nerves to deteriorate in a programmed manner. Many clinical trials depend on supplement in an attempt to improve neuropathy symptoms such as (pain & tingling) and patient quality of life, one of them is Coenzyme Q10 which is reported to have an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects, and was totally nontoxic and non-reported side effects. This study aimed to evaluate using a Coenzyme Q10 supplement as an adjuvant therapy to gabapentin to improve the clinical symptoms of diabetic neuropathy in relation to its anti-inflammatory and antioxid

The particle-hole state densities have been calculated for 232Th in
the case of incident neutron with  ,  1 Z Z T T T T and   2 Z T T .
The finite well depth, surface effect, isospin and Pauli correction are
considered in the calculation of the state densities and then the
transition rates. The isospin correction function ( ) iso f has been
examined for different exciton configurations and at different
excitation energies up to 100 MeV. The present results are indicated
that the included corrections have more affected on transition rates
behavior for        , , and    above 30MeV excitation energy

Artificial Intelligence Algorithms have been used in recent years in many scientific fields. We suggest employing flower pollination algorithm in the environmental field to find the best estimate of the semi-parametric regression function with measurement errors in the explanatory variables and the dependent variable, where measurement errors appear frequently in fields such as chemistry, biological sciences, medicine, and epidemiological studies, rather than an exact measurement. We estimate the regression function of the semi-parametric model by estimating the parametric model and estimating the non-parametric model, the parametric model is estimated by using an instrumental variables method (Wald method, Bartlett’s method, and Durbin

The friendly-environment geophysical methods are commonly used in various engineering and near-surface environmental investigations. Electrical Resistivity Imaging technique was used to investigate the subsurface rocks, sediments properties of a proposed industrial site to characterize the lateral and vertical lithological changes. via the electrical resistivity, to give an overview about the karst, weak and robust subsoil zones. Nineteen 2D ERI profiles using Wenner array with 2 m electrode spacing have been applied to investigate the specific industry area. One of these profiles has been conducted with one-meter electrode spacing. The surveyed profiles are divided into a number of blocks, each block consists of several parallel pr