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.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of Nd:YAG laser shock processing (LSP) on micro-hardness and surface roughness of 86400Cu-Zn alloy. X-ray fluorescence technique was used to analyze the chemical composition of this alloy. LSP treatment was performed with a Q-switched Nd: YAG laser with a wavelength of 1064 nm. The results show that laser shock processing can significantly increase. The micro-hardness and surface roughness of the LSP-treated sample. Vickers diamond indenter was used to measure the micro-hardness of all samples with different laser pulse energy and the different number of laser pulses. It is found that the metal hardness can be significantly increased to more than 80% by increasing the laser energy and t
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Drag has long been identified as the main reason for the loss of energy in fluid transmission like pipelines and other similar transportation channels. The main contributor to this drag is the viscosity as well as friction against the pipe walls, which will results in more pumping power consumption.
The aim in this study was first to understand the role of additives in the viscosity reduction and secondly to evaluate the drag reduction efficiency when blending with different solvents.
This research investigated flow increase (%FI) in heavy oil at different flow rates (2 to 10 m3/hr) in two pipes (0.0381 m & 0.0508 m) ID By using different additives (toluene and naphtha) with different concent
... Show MoreCommunity detection is one of the most fundamental applications in understanding the structure of complicated networks. Furthermore, it is an important approach to identifying closely linked clusters of nodes that may represent underlying patterns and relationships. Networking structures are highly sensitive in social networks, requiring advanced techniques to accurately identify the structure of these communities.Most conventional algorithms for detecting communities perform inadequately with complicated networks. In addition, they miss out on accurately identifying clusters. Since single-objective optimization cannot always generate accurate and comprehensive results, as multi-objective optimization can.Therefore,we utilized two objective
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In this study the isomerization of desulfuerized light Iraqi petroleum naphtha (Al-Dura Refinery) with boiling point range of 37 to 124 °C , 80.5 API specific gravity and 68.2 octane number has been investigated. Two types of catalysts were prepared (Pt/HX and Pt/SrX) by impregnation of 0.8 wt% Pt on l 3X-zeolite. The catalyst activity and selectivity toward isomerization, and catalyst deactivation were investigated.
The isomerization unit consisted of a vertical tubular stainless steel reactor of 2 cm internal diameter, 3 cm external diameter and 68 cm height. The operating pressure was atmospheric for all experimental runs. The liquid flow of lightnaphtha was 0.4 Uh, and the catalyst weight was 50 gm, H/
... Show MoreCooling towers is one of the most important unit in industry, they are used to dispose heat from cooling media used in the integrated units. The choice of the cooling media plays recently an important rule due to fresh-water scarcity. The use of saline as a cooling media become of growing interest, but the corrosion problem has to be taken in consideration. In this study the simultaneous effect of cooling tower operation parameters on the corrosion rate of mild-steel is considered. The role of NaCl content is found to be pronounced more than the working solution temperature and flowrate. The corrosion of mild-steel in these studied factors had shown an interesting result especially with the NaCl% content. Firstly, there was an increase in t
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Hepatitis B is an inflammation of the liver that caused by Hepatitis B virus (HBV) which is DNA virus that infects the human and some kinds of animals such as chimpanzees and birds. This disease considered as the major disease of mankind and a serious global public health problem. HBsAg, HBeAg, HBcAb, HBeAb and HBsAb are markers used to detect the presence and the stage of infection. The current study included (181) individuals from both sexes, (137) males and (44) females. By ratio 3.11: 1.The mean age of patients 2.4033 ± 0.83519 (range 18-73) years as follows < 20 (11.6%), 21–40 (47.5%), 41–60 (29.8%) and > 60 (11.0%) . These patients are 73 (40.4%) Blood donors from Central Blood Bank, 88 (48.6%) Chronic kidney failure at Ibn –
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Karbala province regarded one part significant zones in Iraq and considered an economic resource of vegetation such as trees of fruits, sieve and other vegetation. This research aimed to utilize Normalized Difference Vegetation index (NDVI) and Subtracted (NDVI) for investigating the current vegetation cover at last four decay. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is the most extensively used satellite index of vegetation health and density. The primary goals of this research are gather a gathering of studied area (Karbala province) satellite images in sequence time for a similar region, these image captured by Landsat (TM 1985, TM 1995, ETM+ 2005 and Landsat 8 OLI (Operational Land Imager) 2015. Preprocessing such gap filli
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This study examines the analysis of the contents of the international public relations campaign in confronting the Covid-19 virus, which was taken from the (Your Health is a Trust) campaign for the World Health Organization, Iraq office.The research problem revolves around a main question that is, what are the axes of the campaign (Your Health is a Trust) established by the World Health Organization (Iraq office) in the prevention of Covid 19 virus?From this main question, several sub-questions emerged that this study answered on their Facebook page, and the communication activities of the Covid-19 awareness campaign. In the content analysis form, as this form included a number of main themes and main categoriesthat were adopted in analyzin
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Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a complex endocrine–metabolic disorder characterized by hyperandrogenism, ovulatory dysfunction, insulin resistance, and chronic inflammation resulting in reproductive and metabolic complications. Traditional metformin therapy improves insulin sensitivity, while newer dual incretin agonists, such as tirzepatide, may offer broader metabolic and ovarian protection. The objective of this study is to investigate whether tirzepatide could alter hormonal parameters, metabolism, inflammation, and histopathology of a testosterone propionate–induced PCOS rat model compared with metformin. Thirty prepubertal female Wistar rats were divided into five groups (n = 6). PCOS was induced by testosterone propionate (1
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