Biodiesel is an environmentally friendly fuel and a good substitution for the fossil fuel. However, the purity of this fuel is a major concern that challenges researchers. In this study, a calcium oxide based catalyst has been prepared from local waste eggshells by the calcination method and tested in production biodiesel. The eggshells were powdered and calcined at different temperatures (700, 750, 800, 850 and 900 °C) and periods of time (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 hr.). The effect of calcination temperature and calcination time on the structure and activity of the solid catalyst were examined by X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), and Brunaure-Emmett-Teller (BET). The optimum catalyst performance was obtained at 900 °C

Background: Plaque retention during fixed orthodontic therapy is an important cause of developing enamel demineralization. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of different brackets types on the count of Streptococcus Mutans in orthodontic patients using conventional fluoridated toothpaste. Materials and Methods: Plaque samples were collected from maxillary 1st premolar teeth of twenty right handed patients (using split mouth technique) before bonding, after 48 hrs of bonding using tooth brush only, and after 2 weeks of using fluoridated toothpaste. Stainless steel bracket was bonded on right first premolar while the left one was bonded with sapphire bracket. The calculation of the Streptococcus Mutans count was done usin

Excessive intake of fluoride, mainly through drinking water is a serious health hazard affecting humans worldwide. In this study, the defluoridation capacities of locally available raw waste beef bones have been estimated. Several experimental parameters including contact time, pH, bone dose, fluoride initial concentration, bone grains size, agitation rate, and the effect of co-existence of anions in actual samples of wastewater were studied for fluoride removal from aqueous solutions. Results indicated excellent fluoride removal effeciency up to 99.7% at fluoride initial concentration of 10 mg F/L and 120 min contact time. Maximum fluoride uptake was obtained at neutral pH range 6-7. Fluoride removal kinetic was well described by the ps

This article presents the results of an experimental investigation of using carbon fiber–reinforced polymer sheets to enhance the behavior of reinforced concrete deep beams with large web openings in shear spans. A set of 18 specimens were fabricated and tested up to a failure to evaluate the structural performance in terms of cracking, deformation, and load-carrying capacity. All tested specimens were with 1500-mm length, 500-mm cross-sectional deep, and 150-mm wide. Parameters that studied were opening size, opening location, and the strengthening factor. Two deep beams were implemented as control specimens without opening and without strengthening. Eight deep beams were fabricated with openings but without strengthening, while

The deterioration of buried sewers during their lifetime can be affected by several factors leading to bad performance and can damage the infrastructure similar to other engineering structures. The Hydraulic deterioration of the buried sewers caused by sewer blockages while the structural deterioration caused by sewer collapses due to sewer specifications and the surrounding soil characteristics and the groundwater level. The main objective of this research is to develop deterioration models, which are used to predict changes in sewer condition that can provide assessment tools for determining the serviceability of sewer networks in Baghdad city. Two deterioration models were developed and tested using statistical software SPSS, the

The background subtraction is a leading technique adopted for detecting the moving objects in video surveillance systems. Various background subtraction models have been applied to tackle different challenges in many surveillance environments. In this paper, we propose a model of pixel-based color-histogram and Fuzzy C-means (FCM) to obtain the background model using cosine similarity (CS) to measure the closeness between the current pixel and the background model and eventually determine the background and foreground pixel according to a tuned threshold. The performance of this model is benchmarked on CDnet2014 dynamic scenes dataset using statistical metrics. The results show a better performance against the state-of the art

Bootstrap is one of an important re-sampling technique which has given the attention of  researches recently. The presence of outliers in the original data set may cause serious problem to the classical bootstrap when the percentage of outliers are higher than the original one. Many methods are proposed to overcome this problem such  Dynamic Robust Bootstrap for LTS (DRBLTS) and Weighted Bootstrap with Probability (WBP). This paper try to show the accuracy of parameters estimation by comparison the results of both methods. The bias , MSE and RMSE are considered. The criterion of the accuracy is based on the RMSE value since the method that provide us RMSE value smaller than other is con