Among the metaheuristic algorithms, population-based algorithms are an explorative search algorithm superior to the local search algorithm in terms of exploring the search space to find globally optimal solutions. However, the primary downside of such algorithms is their low exploitative capability, which prevents the expansion of the search space neighborhood for more optimal solutions. The firefly algorithm (FA) is a population-based algorithm that has been widely used in clustering problems. However, FA is limited in terms of its premature convergence when no neighborhood search strategies are employed to improve the quality of clustering solutions in the neighborhood region and exploring the global regions in the search space. On the

Erbil city is located in the northern Iraq with a population of over one million people. Due to water crises farmers usually use wastewater and well water for the agricultural production. In this study six stations were designed to sample waste water and three from well water to define waste water and ground water characteristics. In this study, Residual Na⁺ Carbonate, Mg⁺⁺ hazard, salinity hazard, Kelley index, %sodium, total hardness, permeability index, potential salinity, sodium adsorption ratio, and Irrigation Water Quality Index (IWQI) were determined. The order of average cation concentrations in water was Mg²⁺> Ca²⁺ > Na⁺ > K⁺. While the proportion of main

Internal curing is a method that has been advised to decrease the primary age cracking, mainly of concrete mixes using low (water to cementitious materials - w/cm) ratios corresponding to the self-compacting concrete-(SCC). This research aims to study the effect of the internal curing using saturated lightweight aggregate- (LWA) on the steel reinforcing corrosion in SCC. In this research, crushed bricks or thermostone were partially replaced by (20%) by the weight of sand and volumetrically measured. The results showed that the steel reinforcement of internally cured concrete showed a slight increase in corrosion up to 300 days of exposure to the saline solution (containing 3.5% NaCl). The ability of using the crushed bricks or thermostone

The present work aims to study the removal of dyes from wastewater by reverse osmosis process. Two dyes were used direct blue 6, and direct yellow. Experiments were performed with feed concentration (75 – 450 ppm), operation temperature (30 – 50 oC) and time (0.2 – 2.0 hr). The membrane used is thin film composite membrane (TFC). It was found that modal permeate concentration decreases with increasing feed concentration and time operating, while permeate concentration increases with increasing feed temperature. Also it was found that product rate increase with increasing temperature, but it decrease with increasing feed concentration and time. The concentration of reject solution showed an increase with increasing feed concentratio

Internal curing is a method that has been advised to decrease the primary age cracking, mainly of concrete mixes using low (water to cementitious materials - w/cm) ratios corresponding to the self-compacting concrete-(SCC). This research aims to study the effect of the internal curing using saturated lightweight aggregate- (LWA) on the steel reinforcing corrosion in SCC. In this research, crushed bricks or thermostone were partially replaced by (20%) by the weight of sand and volumetrically measured. The results showed that the steel reinforcement of internally cured concrete showed a slight increase in corrosion up to 300 days of exposure to the saline solution (containing 3.5% NaCl). The ability of using the crushed bricks or thermostone

The escalating generation of industrial waste alongside the growing demand for high-performance, environmentally sustainable drilling fluids presents critical challenges to the oil and gas sector. Conventional drilling fluid additives are predominantly synthesized from virgin materials, contributing to resource depletion and environmental burden. Objectives: This study pioneers a circular economy approach by synthesizing silica nanoparticles (SiO2NPS) and alumina nanoparticles (Al2O3NPs) entirely from locally sourced industrial waste — bentonite clay and aluminum scrap, respectively — and evaluating their performance as functional additives in water-based drilling fluids (WBDFs). Novelty: To the best of our knowledge, this represents th

The Local manufacturing scanning gamma system designed in Tuwaitha site for nondestructive assay method of radioactive waste drums, where it consist of two main parts with their belongings for controlling the of detector and drum movements up-down and rotation respectively. The volume of the used drum is 220 L with 85 cm height. The drum filled with Portland cement. Six cylindrical holes were made within cement drum and distributed in radial arrangement.The152Eu source inserted in these holes individually, to measure the average angular count rate of gamma radiation. The full energy efficiency value for geometry of drum and detector is computed for thirteen photo peaks. The average efficiency represented by the curve of these peaks indic

Among a variety of approaches introduced in the literature to establish duality theory, Fenchel duality was of great importance in convex analysis and optimization. In this paper we establish some conditions to obtain classical strong Fenchel duality for evenly convex optimization problems defined in infinite dimensional spaces. The objective function of the primal problem is a family of (possible) infinite even convex functions. The strong duality conditions we present are based on the consideration of the epigraphs of the c-conjugate of the dual objective functions and the ε-c-subdifferential of the primal objective functions.

Researchers are increasingly using multimodal biometrics to strengthen the security of biometric applications. In this study, a strong multimodal human identification model was developed to address the growing problem of spoofing attacks in biometric security systems. Through the use of metaheuristic optimization methods, such as the Genetic Algorithm(GA), Ant Colony Optimization(ACO), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for feature selection, this unique model incorporates three biometric modalities: face, iris, and fingerprint. Image pre-processing, feature extraction, critical image feature selection, and multibiometric recognition are the four main steps in the workflow of the system. To determine its performance, the model wa