High tunnels, or unheated plastic greenhouses, are becoming increasingly popular among organic vegetable growers across the United States. However, the intensive production typical of these systems presents soil health challenges, including salinization due to high fertilizer or compost inputs coupled with lack of rainfall to leach salts. Legume cover crops may improve soil health in high tunnels by reducing the need for external inputs, while adding organic matter. We tested the soil health effects of a winter hairy vetch (Vicia villosa Roth) cover crop used to replace fertilizer N in an organic tomato cropping system in high tunnels. Studies were replicated across three sites differing in climate and soil type (Kansas, Kentucky, and Minnesota) over three years. We measured vetch cover crop effects on a suite of soil health indicators, including potentially mineralizable nitrogen (PMN), permanganate oxidizable carbon, and microbial biomass. Preliminary results suggest that vetch effects on PMN were highly variable. Soil mineral N, meanwhile, was often lower in the vetch treatment than in a fertilized control, both in spring and in fall. While further work on vetch effects on crop yields is needed, our results suggest that even legume cover crops such as vetch have the potential to reduce nitrate leaching.
In this work, corrosion parameters were evaluated using potentiodynamic polarization curves. In order to determine corrosion parameters of potential and current density of the interesting metal, carbon steel, environmental conditions of external corrosion of buried carbon steel pipeline in Iraqi soil were prepared in the laboratory using simulated prepared conditions. Solutions of sodium chloride at different concentrations (300, 1100, 1900, 2700, and 3500 ppm) were used. pH of solution were acidic at pH =5, and alkaline at pH = 9. Laboratory conditions were similar to those of Iraqi soil where the pipelines were buried. Temperature was constant at 20 °C. Potentiodynamic polarization curves, of potential vs. log current density, were ob
... Show MoreGypseous soil covers approximately 30% of Iraqi lands and is widely used in geotechnical and construction engineering as it is. The demand for residential complexes has increased, so one of the significant challenges in studying gypsum soil due to its unique behavior is understanding its interaction with foundations, such as strip and square footing. This is because there is a lack of experiments that provide total displacement diagrams or failure envelopes, which are well-considered for non-problematic soil. The aim is to address a comprehensive understanding of the micromechanical properties of dry, saturated, and treated gypseous sandy soils and to analyze the interaction of strip base with this type of soil using particle image
... Show MoreOne of the Iraqi geotechnical problems is the presence of gypseous soils covering about (27-36) percentage of Iraq soils containing gypsum between (10-70) ratios. The main reason for soil problematic is the gypsum dissolution when these soils are inundated. However, the soluble gypsum can be leached out of the soil particles, so these problems can be led to cracking, tilting, and collapsing the related soil structure and changing the soil properties. The aim of this work is to investigate the performance of under-reamed piles as a new, improved method to reduce the moisture sensitive and the primary triggering mechanism for the volume reduction of collapsible soil, which is considered as a non-elastic deformation; this was done by c
... Show MoreAn evaluation for the performance of model pile embedded in expansive soil was investigated. An extensive testing program was planned to achieve the purpose of this research. Therefore, special manufactured system was prepared for studying the behavior of model pile having different length to diameter ratios (L/D). Two types of piles were used in this research, straight shaft and under reamed piles. The effect of model pile type, L/D ratio and number of wetting drying cycles were studied. It is observed that significant reductions in pile movement when under reamed piles were considered. A proposed design charts was presented for straight shaft and under reamed piles to estimate the length of both types of piles that is requi
... Show MoreThis paper presents a parametric audio compression scheme intended for scalable audio coding applications, and is particularly well suited for operation at low rates, in the vicinity of 5 to 32 Kbps. The model consists of two complementary components: Sines plus Noise (SN). The principal component of the system is an. overlap-add analysis-by-synthesis sinusoidal model based on conjugate matching pursuits. Perceptual information about human hearing is explicitly included into the model by psychoacoustically weighting the pursuit metric. Once analyzed, SN parameters are efficiently quantized and coded. Our informal listening tests demonstrated that our coder gave competitive performance to the-state-of-the- art HelixTM Producer Plus 9 from
... Show MoreThe application of pultruded (GFRP) composite has become increasingly prominent in civil infrastructure projects. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of experimental and numerical studies conducted on the mechanical characteristics of (GFRP) composites across various temperature conditions, encompassing ambient and fire scenarios. The compilation comprises over 100 scholarly articles that examine the mechanical behavior of (GFRP) materials, specifically emphasizing their tensile and compressive strengths, showed the mechanical properties of (GFRP) materials are commonly compromised when exposed to high temperatures that approach or surpass the resin's glass transition temperature (Tg). In contrast, temperatures that are low
... Show MoreThe increasing use of plastics in various aspects of modern life resulted in the availability of enormous amount of wastes, including a negative effect on the environment and humans. So it is necessary to find solutions to deal with these wastes and ensure to use them as solutions to use in concrete mix . In this research the production of concrete containing high and low density polyethylene has been used by (5, 10, 15)% as a replacement of part of the volume of sand, so as to obtain concrete good compressive strength as well as other benefits such as improved possibility of pumping concrete and reduce the loss of concrete for workability polymer is a material that is non-absorbable of water . It is also intended to dispose of these was
... Show MoreIn the present work, heterojunction diode detectors will be prepared using germanium wafers as a substrate material and 200 nm tin sulfide thickness will be evaporated by using thermal evaporation method as thin film on the substrate. Nd:YAG laser (λ=532 nm) with different energy densities (5.66 J/cm2 and 11.32 J/cm2) is used to diffuse the SnS inside the surface of the germanium samples with 10 laser shots in different environments (vacuum and distilled water). I-V characteristics in the dark illumination, C-V characteristics, transmission measurements, spectral responsivity and quantum efficiency were investigated at 300K. The C-V measurements have shown that the heterojunction were of abrupt type and the maximum value of build-in pot
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