An investigation was conducted for the improvement of viscosity index of a lubricating oil fraction (SAE – 30) obtained from vacuum distillation unit of lube oil plant of Daura Refinery, using solvent extraction process. In this study two type of extraction solvents were used to extract the undesirable materials which reduce the viscosity index of raw lubricating oil fraction, the first solvent was furfural which is un use today in the Iraqi refineries and the second was NMP (N-methyl, 2, pyrrolidone) which is used for the first time in this work to extract the lubricating oil fraction produced from Iraqi crude oils. The studied effecting variables of extraction are extraction temperature range from 70 to 110 oC for furfural and NMP ex

An increasing interest is emerging in identifying natural products to overcome drug resistance in cancer patients. In this context, the present study was conducted to investigate the cytotoxic effects of neem plant (Azadirachta indica) oil in three different biological models (breast cancer cell lines, Allium cepa root tip, and mice vital organs). The cytotoxic potential of the neem oil was evaluated with two human cell lines (MCF7 and MDA-MB231) and an Allum cepa root tip bioassay. Histopathological analysis was conducted on the neem oil-treated and untreated control mice. The results revealed an anti-proliferative effect for neem oil on both estrogen receptor-positive (MCF7) and estrogen receptor-negative (MDA-MB231) breast cancer cell li

Two different oxidative desulfurization strategies based on oxidation/adsorption or oxidation/extraction were evaluated for the desulfurization of AL-Ahdab (AHD) sour crude oil (3.9wt% sulfur content). In the oxidation process, a homogenous oxidizing agent comprising of hydrogen peroxide and formic acid was used. Activated carbons were used as sorbent/catalyst in the oxidation/adsorption process while acetonitrile was used as an extraction solvent in the oxidation/extraction process. For the oxidation/adsorption scheme, the experimental results indicated that the oxidation desulfurization efficiency was enhanced on using activated carbon as catalyst/sorbent. The effects of the operating conditions (contact time, temperat

Changing oil-wet surfaces toward higher water wettability is of key importance in subsurface engineering applications. This includes petroleum recovery from fractured limestone reservoirs, which are typically mixed or oil-wet, resulting in poor productivity as conventional waterflooding techniques are inefficient. A wettability change toward more water-wet would significantly improve oil displacement efficiency, and thus productivity. Another area where such a wettability shift would be highly beneficial is carbon geo-sequestration, where compressed CO2 is pumped underground for storage. It has recently been identified that more water-wet formations can store more CO2. We thus examined how silica based nanofluids can induce such a wettabil

This research aims to analyze and simulate biochemical real test data for uncovering the relationships among the tests, and how each of them impacts others. The data were acquired from Iraqi private biochemical laboratory. However, these data have many dimensions with a high rate of null values, and big patient numbers. Then, several experiments have been applied on these data beginning with unsupervised techniques such as hierarchical clustering, and k-means, but the results were not clear. Then the preprocessing step performed, to make the dataset analyzable by supervised techniques such as Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Classification And Regression Tree (CART), Logistic Regression (LR), K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN), Naïve Bays (NB

This paper presents an approach to license plate localization and recognition. A proposed method is designed to control the opening of door gate based on the recognition of the license plates number in Iraq. In general the system consists of four stages; Image capturing, License plate cropping, character segmentation and character recognition. In the first stage, the vehicle photo is taken from standard camera placed on the door gate with a specific distance from the front of vehicle to be processed by our system. Then, the detection method searches for the matching of the license plate in the image with a standard plate. The segmentation stage is performed by is using edge detection. Then character recognition, done by comparing with templ

Background: During Ramadan, Muslims fast throughout daylight hours. There is a direct link between fasting and increasing incidence of infections. Antibiotic usage for treatment of infections should be based on accurate diagnosis, with the correct dose and dosing regimen for the shortest period to avoid bacterial resistance. This study aimed to evaluate the practices of physicians in prescribing suitable antibiotics for fasting patients and the compliance of the patients in using such antibiotics at regular intervals. Materials and methods: An observational study was carried out during the middle 10 days of Ramadan 2014 in two pharmacies at Baghdad. A total of 34 prescriptions (Rx) for adults who suffered from infections were examined. For

The subject of this research involves studying adsorption to remove hexavalent chromium Cr(VI) from aqueous solutions. Adsorption process on bentonite clay as adsorbent was used in the Cr(VI) concentration range (10-100) ppm at different temperatures (298, 303, 308 and 313)K, for different periods of time. The adsorption isotherms were obtained by obeying Langmuir and Freundlich adsorption isotherm with R2 (0.9921-0.9060) and (0.994-0.9998), respectively. The thermodynamic parameters were calculated by using the adsorption process at four different temperatures the values of ?H, ?G and ?S was [(+6.582 ? +6.547) kJ.mol-1, (-284.560 ? -343.070) kJ.mol-1 and (+0.977 ? +1.117) kJ.K-1.mol-1] respectively. This data indicates the spontaneous sorp