This paper aims to study the biosorption for removal of lead, cadmium, copper and arsenic ions using algae as a biosorbent. A series of experiments were carried out to obtain the breakthrough data in a fluidized bed reactor. The minimum fluidization velocities of beds were found to be 2.27 and 3.64 mm/s for mish sizes of 0.4-0.6 and 0.6-1 mm diameters, respectively. An ideal plug flow model has been adopted to characterize the fluidized bed reactor. This model has been solved numerically using MATLAB version 6.5. The results showed a well fitting with the experimental data. Different operating conditions were varied: static bed height, superficial velocity and particle diameter. The breakthrough curves were plotted for each metal. Pb2+ s

Text based-image clustering (TBIC) is an insufficient approach for clustering related web images. It is a challenging task to abstract the visual features of images with the support of textual information in a database. In content-based image clustering (CBIC), image data are clustered on the foundation of specific features like texture, colors, boundaries, shapes. In this paper, an effective CBIC) technique is presented, which uses texture and statistical features of the images. The statistical features or moments of colors (mean, skewness, standard deviation, kurtosis, and variance) are extracted from the images. These features are collected in a one dimension array, and then genetic algorithm (GA) is applied for image clustering.

Modified asphalt is considered one of the alternatives to address the problems of deficiencies in traditional asphalt concrete, as modified asphalt addresses many of the issues that appear on the pavement layers in asphalt concrete, resulting from heavy traffic and vehicles loaded with loads that exceed the design loads and the large fluctuations in the daily and seasonal temperatures of asphalt concrete. The current study examined the role of polyphosphoric acid (PPA) as a modified material for virgin asphalt when it was added in different proportions (1%, 2%, 3%, 4%) of the asphalt weight. The experimental program includes the volumetric characteristics associated with the Marshall test, the physical properties, and th

The experimental and numerical analysis was performed on pipes suffering large plastic deformation through expanding them using rigid conical shaped mandrels, with three different cone angles (15◦, 25◦, 35◦) and diameters (15, 17, 20) mm. The experimental test for the strain results investigated the expanded areas. A numerical solution of the pipes expansion process was also investigated using the commercial finite element software ANSYS. The strains were measured for each case experimentally by stamping the mesh on the pipe after expanding, then compared with Ansys results. No cracks were generated during the process with the selected angles. It can be concluded that the strain decreased with greater angles of con

Solar photovoltaic (PV) system has emerged as one of the most promising technology to generate clean energy. In this work, the performance of monocrystalline silicon photovoltaic module is studied through observing the effect of necessary parameters: solar irradiation and ambient temperature. The single diode model with series resistors is selected to find the characterization of current-voltage (I-V) and power-voltage (P-V) curves by determining the values of five parameters ( ). This model shows a high accuracy in modeling the solar PV module under various weather conditions. The modeling is simulated via using MATLAB/Simulink software. The performance of the selected solar PV module is tested experimentally for differ

In the literature, several correlations have been proposed for bubble size prediction in bubble columns. However these correlations fail to predict bubble diameter over a wide range of conditions. Based on a data bank of around 230 measurements collected from the open literature, a correlation for bubble sizes in the homogenous region in bubble columns was derived using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) modeling. The bubble diameter was found to be a function of six parameters: gas velocity, column diameter, diameter of orifice, liquid density, liquid viscosity and liquid surface tension. Statistical analysis showed that the proposed correlation has an Average Absolute Relative Error (AARE) of 7.3 % and correlation coefficient of 92.2%. A

The study aims to evaluate the removal of sulfur content from Iraqi light naphtha produced in Al-Dora refinery by adsorption desulfurization DS technique using modified activated carbon MAC loaded with nickel Ni and copper Cu as single binary metals. The experiments were carried in a batch unit with various operating parameters;  MAC dosage, agitation speed, and a contact time of 300 min at constant initial sulfur concentration 155 ppm and temperature. The results showed higher DS% by AC/Ni-Cu (66.45)% at 500 rpm and 1 g dosage than DS (29.03)% by activated carbon AC, increasing MAC dosage, agitation speed, and contact time led to increasing DS% values.  The adsorption capacity of MAC results was recorded (16,

We consider the problem of calibrating range measurements of a Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) sensor that is dealing with the sensor nonlinearity and heteroskedastic, range-dependent, measurement error. We solved the calibration problem without using additional hardware, but rather exploiting assumptions on the environment surrounding the sensor during the calibration procedure. More specifically we consider the assumption of calibrating the sensor by placing it in an environment so that its measurements lie in a 2D plane that is parallel to the ground. Then, its measurements come from fixed objects that develop orthogonally w.r.t. the ground, so that they may be considered as fixed points in an inertial reference frame. Moreov

In cognitive radio system, the spectrum sensing has a major challenge in needing a sensing method, which has a high detection capability with reduced complexity. In this paper, a low-cost hybrid spectrum sensing method with an optimized detection performance based on energy and cyclostationary detectors is proposed. The method is designed such that at high signal-to-noise ratio SNR values, energy detector is used alone to perform the detection. At low SNR values, cyclostationary detector with reduced complexity may be employed to support the accurate detection. The complexity reduction is done in two ways: through reducing the number of sensing samples used in the autocorrelation process in the time domain and through using the Slid

Abstract

 The objective of image fusion is to merge multiple sources of images together in such a way that the final representation contains higher amount of useful information than any input one.. In this paper, a weighted average fusion method is proposed. It depends on using weights that are extracted from source images using counterlet transform. The extraction method is done by making the approximated transformed coefficients equal to zero, then taking the inverse counterlet transform to get the details of the images to be fused. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been verified on several grey scale and color test  images, and compared with some present methods.