The deficiency of potable water resources and energy supply is emerging as a significant and concerning obstacle to sustainable development. Solar and waste heat-powered humidification dehumidification (HDH) desalination systems become essential due to the severe impacts of global warming and water shortages. This problem highlights the need to apply boosted water desalination solutions. Desalination is a capital-intensive process that demands considerable energy, predominantly sourced from fossil fuels worldwide, posing a significant carbon footprint risk. HDH is a very efficient desalination method suitable for remote areas with moderate freshwater requirements for domestic and agricultural usage. Several operational and maintenance conce

In this work, monitoring of monthly variation (from May 2016 to October 2016) in the concentration of the metals (Co, Zn, Cd, Pb, Ni and Fe) from Al-Diwaniya city of Iraq. Investigation about the pollution with these metals was achieved from five selected sites locate in study area by flame atomic absorption spectroscopy. The results showed a wide variation in the levels of heavy metals from site to site and from month to month. A total of 180 surface soil samples were analyzed to detecting the pollution with selected samples. The resultsshowed that the highest concentration with Ni was 6.290 mg kg-1 while the lowest concentration detected with Ni was 0.080 mg kg-1. The results of pollution index (enrichment factor, contamination factor, po

The accumulation of toxic elements in vegetables and melons grown in agriculture, Brassica rapa - turnip, Solanum lycopersicum - tomato, Citrullus lanatus - watermelon, Capsicum annuum - bell pepper, Daucus carota - carrots, Cucurbita pepo - pumpkin, Cucumis melo - melon, and also Prunus armeniaca - apricot from fruit trees were analyzed. The excess of maximum allowable concentrations in agricultural crops of the element As by 1.65-1.75, Cd - 1.6-2.3, Cr -1.2-2.35, Cu -1.6-3.3, Ni - 1.16-3.53, Pb - 1.54-3.08, Al - 1.36-3.5, Sb - 2.0-33, Se - 1.1-3.3 times was established. The maximum allowable concentration of mercury in vegetables and melons was equal to 0.02 mg/kg,

In the present study, a novel ligand (L) made of 2-hydroxynaphthaldehyde and 3-hydrazone-1,3-dihydro-indole-2-one(3-[(3-hydroxynaphthalen-2-yl-ethylidene)-hydrazono]-1,3-dihydro-indol-2-one). The ligand was characterized by FTIR, UV-vis, mass, 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR, and CHN elemental analysis. New complexes of this ligand were created by treating methanol and a drop of DMF solution of the produced ligand with the hydrated metal salts of Mn(II), Co(II), Ni(II), Cu(II), and Zn(II) in a molar ratio of 2:1 (L:M). As a result, complexes have been emerged and identified FTIR, UV-vis, C.H.N., chloride-containing, molar conductance, magnetic susceptibility, and atomic absorption. The characterization result for each complex indicated complexes wi

In this research the results of applying Artificial Neural Networks with modified activation function to
perform the online and offline identification of four Degrees of Freedom (4-DOF) Selective Compliance
Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) manipulator robot will be described. The proposed model of
identification strategy consists of a feed-forward neural network with a modified activation function that
operates in parallel with the SCARA robot model. Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN) which have
been trained online and offline have been used, without requiring any previous knowledge about the
system to be identified. The activation function that is used in the hidden layer in FFNN is a modified
version of the wavelet func

In this research the results of applying Artificial Neural Networks with modified activation function to perform the online and offline identification of four Degrees of Freedom (4-DOF) Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) manipulator robot will be described. The proposed model of identification strategy consists of a feed-forward neural network with a modified activation function that operates in parallel with the SCARA robot model. Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN) which have been trained online and offline have been used, without requiring any previous knowledge about the system to be identified. The activation function that is used in the hidden layer in FFNN is a modified version of the wavelet function. This approach ha

When the depth of stressed soil is rather small, Plate Load Test (PLT) becomes the most efficient test to estimate the soil properties for design purposes. Among these properties, modulus of subgrade reaction is the most important one that usually employed in roads and concrete pavement design. Two methods are available to perform PLT: static and dynamic methods. Static PLT is usually adopted due to its simplicity and time saving to be performs in comparison with cyclic (dynamic) method. The two methods are described in ASTM standard.

In this paper the effect of the test method used in PLT in estimation of some mechanical soil properties was distinguished via a series of both test methods applied in a same site. The comparison of

Background: Mobile phones are approximately widely used everywhere like in hospital wards, clinics and universities as well as biomedical laboratories. They have become very important tool in students’ life. In contrast, these tools carry many harmful bacteria which are responsible for infectious diseases in human because they serve as a reservoir for different pathogens. Current study was aimed to isolate bacteria from students’ mobile phones at the Institute of Medical Technology/Al-Mansour/The Middle Technical University, Baghdad, Iraq. Also, the study investigated microbial resistance to many antimicrobial agents as well as the appropriate remedial measures. Method: Four hundred and fifty swabs from mobile phones were collected from