Lignin has emerged as a promising asphalt binder modifier due to its sustainable and renewable nature, with the potential to improve flexible pavement performance. This study investigates the use of Soda Lignin Powder (SLP), derived from Pinus wood sawdust via alkaline treatment, as an asphalt modifier to enhance mixture durability. SLP was characterized using Fourier Transformation Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray Diffraction (XRD), and Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy Dispersive X-ray Analysis (SEM/EDX), revealing significant changes in its chemical structure post-extraction. These analyses showed the presence of phenolic units, including hydroxyphenyl propane, syringyl, and guaiacyl units. The morphology of SLP was identified as irregular and spherical particles consisting of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur. Experimental evaluations involved three SLP dosages (2%, 4%, and 6% by weight of asphalt binder), with tests for penetration, softening point, ductility and rotational viscosity. Additionally, the asphalt mixtures were tested for their performance in terms of moisture susceptibility, resilient modulus, permanent deformation, and fatigue resistance. Results indicated that SLP effectively reduces the temperature susceptibility of asphalt by increasing its stiffness and rotational viscosity. Furthermore, mixtures with 6% SLP showed enhanced moisture resistance, with a Tensile Strength Ratio (TSR) of 86.98%, a 74.1% reduction in accumulated permanent deformation at 10,000 cycles, and a 38.1% increase in the Cracking Tolerance Index (CT index) compared to the control mix (0% SLP content). These findings confirm that SLP has the potential to be an effective additive in the design of asphalt mixture. Moreover, it allows producing endurable mixtures with higher resistance to distress.
Reciprocal Teaching is an interactive method that is used to improve reading comprehension. Using this teaching strategy, teachers and students take turns leading discussions regarding sections of text using the four strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing. This study is an attempt to investigate the effect of using reciprocal teaching on improving female college students' achievement in reading comprehension. To fulfill the aim of the study, the researcher has adopted two null hypotheses: first, there is no significant difference between the achievement of students' who practice the reciprocal teaching technique and that of students who do not practice it. Second, there is no statistically significant difference
... Show MoreBackground: Emergency contraception (EC) is a general term used to describe drugs and devices that are utilized to prevent pregnancy following unprotected intercourse or in the event of contraceptive failure. This postcoital birth-control option is available by means of hormonal pills or copper-bearing intrauterine device.Objectives: The objectives of the study were to assess the women's knowledge regarding EC, to compare the knowledge of school teachers with other women in the community, as well as assessing the pre-post test knowledge of teachers.Type of the study: A cross sectional and quasi- experimental study.Methods: It was carried out in Duhok during the period from 20th of November 2014 to 6th of January 2015. A Simple and system
... Show MoreThe Moisture damage is considered as one of the main challenge for the experts in the field of asphalt pavement design. The aims of the present study is to modify moisture resistance of the asphalt concrete by utilizing ceramic fibers as a type of reinforcement incorporated with hydrated lime. For this purpose, a penetration grade of the asphalt cement (40-50) was utilized as a binder with an aggregate of the maximum nominal size of 12.5mm and mineral filler limestone dust. A series of specimens has been fabricated by utilizing 0.50, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 percentages of ceramic fibers. For each of these contents, another subsequent group of specimens with hydrated lime with 0.0, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 percentages were moulded. For the additi
... Show MoreThe effect of three ionic liquids viz., 1-hexyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate (ILE), 1-hexyl-3-metylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate (ILF) and 1-octyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate (ILG) when used as surfactants on the performance of dissolved air floatation (DAF) was investigated.
Experiments were conducted at a temperature of 30-35 ºC, 10ppm ferric chloride as coagulant, 50% recycle ratio, pH 8, and 10 minutes treatment time to find oil and grease (OG) and turbidity removal efficiencies at saturation pressure (2-6) bar.
ILs were used at concentration of 50 µl/liter of treated water in two positions in DAF system; the saturation vessel and the treatment tank. The performance using ILs
... Show MoreThe present research has investigated the effect of microwave energy on improving the flow properties of heavy crude oil. The fragmentation of crude oil molecules was carried out with and without using 1 and 10 wt. % concentration of various types of H-donors like tetralin, cyclohexane, and naphtha. Microwave power of 320, 385, and 540 W and radiation time 1-9 min, and temperature were studied. The kinematic viscosity and asphaltene content were measured for evaluation the improving of heavy crude oil.
Results show that viscosity of crude oil decreased with increase H-donor concentration, a maximum percentage of viscosity reduction was10.63 % for tetralin at 6 min radiation time, while 8.67%, and 7.34% for cycl
... Show MoreSocial media and news agencies are major sources for tracking news and events. With these sources' massive amounts of data, it is easy to spread false or misleading information. Given the great dangers of fake news to societies, previous studies have given great attention to detecting it and limiting its impact. As such, this work aims to use modern deep learning techniques to detect Arabic fake news. In the proposed system, the attention model is adapted with bidirectional long-short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) to identify the most informative words in the sentence. Then, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) is applied to classify news articles as fake or real. The experiments are conducted on a newly launched Arabic dataset called the Ara
... Show MoreThis paper presents a study of a syndrome coding scheme for different binary linear error correcting codes that refer to the code families such as BCH, BKLC, Golay, and Hamming. The study is implemented on Wyner’s wiretap channel model when the main channel is error-free and the eavesdropper channel is a binary symmetric channel with crossover error probability (0 < Pe ≤ 0.5) to show the security performance of error correcting codes while used in the single-staged syndrome coding scheme in terms of equivocation rate. Generally, these codes are not designed for secure information transmission, and they have low equivocation rates when they are used in the syndrome coding scheme. Therefore, to improve the transmiss
... Show MoreThis study aims mainly to identify the role of the use of blockchain technology in improving the quality of digital financial reports, answering questions and testing the hypothesis of the study, the researchers relied on the descriptive analytical approach, and to obtain the necessary data a questionnaire was distributed after evaluation to the study community.
The results of the study have shown that the use of blockchain technology helps to provide a high degree of reliability in digital financial reports published to banks over the Internet, ensure the speed of completion and completion, and maintain the privacy and confidentiality of the information contained in the digital financial reports of banks
... Show MoreThis study was achieved to satisfy two goals, the first of which is to treat an environmental problem represented by the disposal of date seeds, and the second is the use of these wastes to improve some mechanical and thermal properties of poly methyl methacrylate PMMA through strengthening different proportions of the powder of date seeds.
Particles of date seeds were used as a natural strengthening material for PMMA polymer, by mixing the matrix material (resin) with the hardener while still stirring continuously for a period of 10 min. After that, the samples of the reinforced material were prepared by adding the powder of date seeds, which is the reinforcing substance, with different percentages of weight fraction (0, 0.5, 1,
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