An innovative two-step noncatalytic esterifcation technique was proposed to synthesize alkyl esters from free fatty acids simulated in waste cooking oil, as a pretreatment process for biodiesel production, without adding any catalyst under normal conditions of pressure and temperature. The efect of methanol:oil molar ratio, reaction time, mixing rate, and reaction temperature were investigated. The results confrmed that the conversion of the reaction was increased when increasing the methanol molar ratio and decreased in prolonged reaction temperature. High conversion (94.545%) was successfully achieved at optimized conditions of 115:1, 65:1 methanol:oil molar ratio in the frst step and second step, respectively, other conditions i

This study presents an adaptive control scheme based on synergetic control theory for suppressing the vibration of building structures due to earthquake. The control key for the proposed controller is based on a magneto-rheological (MR) damper, which supports the building. According to Lyapunov-based stability analysis, an adaptive synergetic control (ASC) strategy was established under variation of the stiffness and viscosity coefficients in the vibrated building. The control and adaptive laws of the ASC were developed to ensure the stability of the controlled structure. The proposed controller addresses the suppression problem of a single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) building model, and an earthquake control scenario was conducted and simulat

 Two simple and sensitive spectrophotometric methods are proposed for the determination of amitriptyline in its pure form and in tablets. The first method is based on the formation of charge- transfer complex between amitriptyline as n-donor and tetracyano-ethylene (TCNE) as Ï€acceptor. The product exhibit absorbance maximum at 470 nm in acetonitrile solvent (pH =9.0 ) . In the second method the absorbance of the ion- pair complex, which is formed between the soughted drug and bromocresol green (BCG), was measured at 415 nm at ( pH=3.5) . In addition to classical univariate optimization, modified simplex method (MSM) was applied in the optimization of the variable affecting  the color producing reaction by a geometric simple

Columns subjected to pure axial load rarely exist in practice. Reinforced concrete columns are usually subjected to combination of axial and lateral actions and  deformations, caused by  spatially‐complex loading patterns as during earthquakes causes lateral deflection that in turn affects the horizontal stiffness. In this study, a numerical model was developed in threedimensional nonlinear finite element and then validated against experimental results reported in the literatures,
to investigate the behavior of conventionally RC columns subjected to axial load and  . lateral reversal cyclic loading. To achieve this goal, numerical analysis was conducted by using finite element program ABAQUS/Explicit. The variables co

In this study, three strengthening techniques, near-surface mounted NSM-CRFP, NSM-CFRP with externally bonding EB-CFRP, and hybrid CFRP with circularization were studied to increase the seismic performance of existing RC slender columns under lateral loads. Experimentally, 1:3 scale RC models were studied and subjected to both lateral static load and seismic excitation. In the dynamic test, a model was subjected to El Centro 1940 NS earthquake excitation by using a shaking table. According to the test results, the strengthening techniques showed a significant increase in load carrying capacity, of about 86.6%, and 46.6%, for circularization and NSM-CFRP respectively, of the reference unstrengthened columns. On the other hand, column

Trimmed Linear moments (TL-moments) are natural generalization of L-moments that do not require the mean of the underlying distribution to exist. It is known that the sample TL-moments is unbiased estimators to corresponding population TL-moment. Since different choices for the amount of trimming give different values of the estimators it is important to choose the estimator that has minimum mean squares error than others. Therefore, we derive an optimal choice for the amount of trimming from known distributions based on the minimum errors between the estimators. Moreover, we study simulation-based approach to choose an optimal amount of trimming and maximum like hood method by computing the estimators and mean squares error for range of

This paper presents a new algorithm in an important research field which is the semantic word similarity estimation. A new feature-based algorithm is proposed for measuring the word semantic similarity for the Arabic language. It is a highly systematic language where its words exhibit elegant and rigorous logic. The score of sematic similarity between two Arabic words is calculated as a function of their common and total taxonomical features. An Arabic knowledge source is employed for extracting the taxonomical features as a set of all concepts that subsumed the concepts containing the compared words. The previously developed Arabic word benchmark datasets are used for optimizing and evaluating the proposed algorithm. In this paper,

The propagation of laser beam in the underdense deuterium plasma has been studied via computer simulation using the fluid model. An appropriate computer code “HEATER” has been modified and is used for this purpose. The propagation is taken to be in a cylindrical symmetric medium. Different laser wavelengths (1 = 10.6 m, 2 = 1.06 m, and 3 = 0.53 m) with a Gaussian pulse type and 15 ns pulse widths have been considered. Absorption energy and laser flux have been calculated for different plasma and laser parameters. The absorbed laser energy showed maximum for  = 0.53 m. This high absorbitivity was inferred to the effect of the pondermotive force.