Electrospinning is a novel technique that can be used to produce highly porous fibers with highly tunable properties. In this research, this technique is adopted to prepare the electrospun nanofiber membrane for membrane distillation application. A custom-built electrospinning setup was made to prepare the nanofibers membrane. Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymer was used in the electrospinning process due to its high hydrophobicity. Electrospun (PVDF) nanofibers were tested in direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) process using 0.6 M sodium chloride as a feed solution. The resulting nanofiber membrane exhibited high performance in DCMD (i.e. relatively high water flux and high salt rejection). It has been found that the prepared membrane has a uniform and fibrous structure as indicated by the scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Relatively thin fibers with a diameter of 250 nm were produced during the Electrospinning process.
In this work, thin films of undoped and Al-doped CdO with (0.5, 1 and 2) wt.% were prepared by using thermal vacuum evaporation on glass substrate at room temperature. The optical absorption coefficient (α) of the films was determined from transmittance spectra in the range of wavelength (400-1100) nm. The spectral transmission and the optical energy band gap decrease from 75% and 2.24 eV to 20% and 2.1 eV respectively depending upon the Al content in the films, also our studies include the calculation of the optical constants (refractive index, extinction coefficient, real and imaginary part of dielectric constant) as a function of photon energy. It is evaluated that the optical band gap of
... Show MoreThis paper experimentally investigates the heating process of a hot water supply using a neural network implementation of a self-tuning PID controller on a microcontroller system. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm employed in system tuning proved very effective, as it is simple and fast optimization algorithm. The PSO method for the PID parameters is executed on the Matlab platform in order to put these parameters in the real-time digital PID controller, which was experimented with in a pilot study on a microcontroller platform. Instead of the traditional phase angle power control (PAPC) method, the Cycle by Cycle Power Control (CBCPC) method is implemented because it yields better power factor and eliminates harmonics
... Show MoreIn this study, the potential of adsorption of amoxicillin antibiotic (AMOX) from aqueous solutions using prepared activated carbon (AC) was studied. The used AC was prepared from an inexpensive and available precursor (sunflower seed hulls (SSH)) and activated by potassium hydroxide (KOH). The prepared AC was examined for its ability to remove AMOX from aqueous contaminated solutions and characterized with the aid of N2 -adsorption/desorption isotherm Brunauer–Emmett– Teller, scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and Fourier-transform infrared. Zeta potential of the prepared activated carbon from sunflower seed hulls (SSHAC) were studied in relation to AMOX adsorption. The physical and chemical propert
... Show MoreDuring COVID-19, wearing a mask was globally mandated in various workplaces, departments, and offices. New deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) based classifications were proposed to increase the validation accuracy of face mask detection. This work introduces a face mask model that is able to recognize whether a person is wearing mask or not. The proposed model has two stages to detect and recognize the face mask; at the first stage, the Haar cascade detector is used to detect the face, while at the second stage, the proposed CNN model is used as a classification model that is built from scratch. The experiment was applied on masked faces (MAFA) dataset with images of 160x160 pixels size and RGB color. The model achieve
... Show MoreBackground: The adverse effects of drugs can damage various organs, especially the liver, leading to a hepatic injury known as hepatotoxicity. Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is challenging nowadays because of the large number of different drugs used, one of the offending medications that cause DILI is carbamazepine (CBZ), since the liver has an array of functions including detoxification, it will deal with several damages caused by exposure to the drugs. Objective: investigate the effect of (CBZ) 20mg/kg/day on female mice liver after 14 and 30 days of treatment on morphological and histopathological levels. Materials and Methods: 20mg/kg/day of CBZ was administered orally for (14) days to (10) female mice, another (10) mice were taking t
... Show MoreA (k,n)-arc A in a finite projective plane PG(2,q) over Galois field GF(q), q=p⿠for same prime number p and some integer n≥2, is a set of k points, no n+1 of which are collinear. A (k,n)-arc is complete if it is not contained in a(k+1,n)-arc. In this paper, the maximum complete (k,n)-arcs, n=2,3 in PG(2,4) can be constructed from the equation of the conic.
The microstructures of rapidly solidified laser clad layers of laser cladding of Inconel 617 with different nickel-aluminum premixed clad powders are discussed. The effect of different cladding speeds on the microstructures of rapidly solidified laser clad layers is discussed too. The detailed microstructural results showed that different growth mechanisms are produced during rapid solidification. These are planar, cellular, cellular/dendritic and dendritic.
Rainwater harvesting could be a possible solution to decrease the consequences of water scarcity and energy deficiency in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). This study aims to calculate the water and energy (electricity) saved by rainwater harvesting for rooftops and green areas in Sulaimani city, KR, Iraq. Various data were acquired from different formal entities in Sulaimani city. Moreover, Google Earth and ArcMap 10.4 software were used for digitizing and calculating the total rooftop and green areas. The results showed that for the used runoff coefficients (0.8 and 0.95), the harvested rainwater volumes were 2901563 and 12197131 m³ during the study period (2005 – 2006) and (2019-2020). Moreover, by compa
... Show MoreTiO2 thin films have been deposited at different concentration of
CdO of (x= 0.0, 0.05, 0.1, 0.15 and 0.2) Wt. % onto glass substrates
by pulsed laser deposition technique (PLD) using Nd-YAG laser
with λ=1064nm, energy=800mJ and number of shots=500. The
thickness of the film was 200nm. The films were annealed to
different annealing (423 and 523) k. The effect of annealing
temperatures and concentration of CdO on the structural and
photoluminescence (PL) properties were investigated. X-ray
diffraction (XRD) results reveals that the deposited TiO2(1-x)CdOx
thin films were polycrystalline with tetragonal structure and many
peaks were appeared at (110), (101), (111) and (211) planes with
preferred orientatio