The aim of the current study was to develop a nanostructured double-layer for hydrophobic molecules delivery system. The developed double-layer consisted of polyethylene glycol-based polymeric (PEG) followed by gelatin sub coating of the core hydrophobic molecules containing sodium citrate. The polymeric composition ratio of PEG and the amount of the sub coating gelatin were optimized using the two-level fractional method. The nanoparticles were characterized using AFM and FT-IR techniques. The size of these nano capsules was in the range of 39-76 nm depending on drug loading concentration. The drug was effectively loaded into PEG-Gelatin nanoparticles (≈47%). The hydrophobic molecules-release characteristics in terms of controlled-releas
... Show MoreThis study investigates the surgical and thermal effects on oral soft tissues produced by CO2 laser emitting at 10.6 micrometers with three different fluences 490.79, 1226.99 and 1840.4 J/cm2. These effects are specifically; incision depth, incision width and the tissue damage width and depth. The results showed that increasing the fluence and /or the number of beam passes increase the average depths of ablation. Moreover, increasing the fluence and the number of beam passes increase the adjacent tissue damage in width and depth. Surgeons using CO2 laser should avoid multiple pulses of the laser beam over the same area, to avoid unintentional tissue damage.
Flexible pavement design and analysis were carried out in the past with semi-experimental methods, using elastic characteristics of pavement layers. Due to the complex interferences between various layers and their time consumption, the traditional pavement analysis, and design methods were replaced with fast and powerful methods including the Finite Element Method (FEM) and the Discrete Element Method (DEM). FEM requires less computational power and is more appropriate for continuous environments. In this study, flexible pavement consisting of 5 layers (surface, binder, base, subbase, and subgrade) had been analyzed using FEM. The ABAQUS (6.14-2) software had been utilized to investigate the influence of the base layer depth on ver
... Show MoreThe Khor Mor gas-condensate processing plant in Iraq is currently facing operational challenges due to foaming issues in the sweetening tower caused by high-soluble hydrocarbon liquids entering the tower. The root cause of the problem could be liquid carry-over as the separation vessels within the plant fail to remove liquid droplets from the gas phase. This study employs Aspen HYSYS v.11 software to investigate the performance of the industrial three-phase horizontal separator, Bravo #2, located upstream of the Khor Mor sweetening tower, under both current and future operational conditions. The simulation results, regarding the size distribution of liquid droplets in the gas product and the efficiency gas/liquid separation, r
... Show MoreCredit risk assessment has become an important topic in financial risk administration. Fuzzy clustering analysis has been applied in credit scoring. Gustafson-Kessel (GK) algorithm has been utilised to cluster creditworthy customers as against non-creditworthy ones. A good clustering analysis implemented by good Initial Centres of clusters should be selected. To overcome this problem of Gustafson-Kessel (GK) algorithm, we proposed a modified version of Kohonen Network (KN) algorithm to select the initial centres. Utilising similar degree between points to get similarity density, and then by means of maximum density points selecting; the modified Kohonen Network method generate clustering initial centres to get more reasonable clustering res
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