Poly (3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) is a typical microbial bio-polyester reserve material; known as “green plastics”, which produced under controlled conditions as intracellular products of the secondary metabolism of diverse gram-negative/positive bacteria and various extremophiles archaea. Although PHB has properties allowing being very attractive, it is too expensive to compete with conventional and non-biodegradable plastics. Feasibility of this research to evaluate the suitability of using a watermelon-derived media as an alternative substrate for PHB synthesis under stress conditions was examined. Results, include the most nutrients extraction, indicated that the watermelon seeds contain a high content of nutrients makes them a promisi

In this work, copper substituted cobalt ferrite nanoparticles with
chemical formula Co1-xCuxFe2O4 (x=0, 0.3, and 0.7), has been
synthesized via hydrothermal preparation method. The structure of
the prepared materials was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD).
The (XRD) patterns showed single phase spinel ferrite structure.
Average crystallite size (D), lattice constant (a), and crystal density
(dx) have been calculated from the most intense peak (311).
Comparative standardization also performed using smaller average
particle size (D) on the XRD patterns of as-prepared ferrite samples
in order to select most convenient hydrothermal synthesis conditions
to get ferrite materials with smallest average particl

As 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

In this research, the removal of cadmium (Cd) from simulated wastewater was investigated by using a fixed bed bio-electrochemical reactor. The effects of the main controlling factors on the performance of the removal process such as applied cell voltage, initial Cd concentration, pH of the catholyte, and the mesh number of the cathode were investigated. The results showed that the applied cell voltage had the main impact on the removal efficiency of cadmium where increasing the applied voltage led to higher removal efficiency. Meanwhile increasing the applied voltage was found to be given lower current efficiency and higher energy consumption.  No significant effect of initial Cd concentration on the removal efficie

The aim of this research is to assess the validity of Detailed Micro-Modeling (DMM) as a numerical model for masonry analysis. To achieve this aim, a set of load-displacement curves obtained based on both numerical simulation and experimental results of clay masonry prisms loaded by a vertical load. The finite element method was implemented in DMM for analysis of the experimental clay masonry prism. The finite element software ABAQUS with implicit solver was used to model and analyze the clay masonry prism subjected to a vertical load. The load-displacement relationship of numerical model was found in good agreement with those drawn from experimental results. Evidence shows that load-displacement curvefound from the finite element m

This paper describes a new finishing process using magnetic abrasives were newly made to finish effectively brass plate that is very difficult to be polished by the conventional machining processes. Taguchi experimental design method was adopted for evaluating the effect of the process parameters on the improvement of the surface roughness and hardness by the magnetic abrasive polishing. The process parameters are: the applied current to the inductor, the working gap between the workpiece and the inductor, the rotational speed and the volume of powder. The analysis of variance(ANOVA) was analyzed using statistical software to identify the optimal conditions for better surface roughness and hardness. Regressions models based on statistical m

An adaptive nonlinear neural controller to reduce the nonlinear flutter in 2-D wing is proposed in the paper. The nonlinearities in the system come from the quasi steady aerodynamic model and torsional spring in pitch direction. Time domain simulations are used to examine the dynamic aero elastic instabilities of the system (e.g. the onset of flutter and limit cycle oscillation, LCO). The structure of the controller consists of two models :the modified Elman neural network (MENN) and the feed forward multi-layer Perceptron (MLP). The MENN model is trained with off-line and on-line stages to guarantee that the outputs of the model accurately represent the plunge and pitch motion of the wing and this neural model acts as the identifier. Th