Anaerobic digestion (AD) is the most common process for dealing with primary and secondary wastewater sludge. In the present work, four pre-treatment methods (ultrasonic, chemical, thermal, and thermo-chemical) are investigated in Al-Rustumya Wastewater Treatment plant in order to find their effect on biogas production and volatile solid removal efficiency during anaerobic digestion.
Two frequencies of ultrasonic wave were used 30 KHz and 50 KHz during the pre-treatment. Sodium hydroxide was added in different amounts to give three pH values of 9, 10 and 11 in chemical pre-treating processes. The sludge was heated at 60oC and 80oC through thermal pre-treatment experiment. Also, the sludge was treated thermo-chemically at 80 oC and pH

A simple and novel membraneless paper-based microfluidic fuel cell was presented in this study. The occurrence of laminar flow was employed to ensure no mixing of the fuel and oxidant fluids along the bath of reaction. The acidic wastewater was used as a fuel. It was an air-breathing cell, so air and tab water were used as oxidants. Both the fuel and tab water flowed continuously under gravity. Whatman filter paper was used for preparation of the fuel cell channel and two carbon fibre electrodes were used and firmed on the edges of the cell. The performance of the cell was examined over three consecutive days. The results indicated that the present cell has the potential to generate electric power, but an extensive study is required to harv

Objective: Evaluation of the poly ether keton keton polymer (PEKK) coating material on the commercial pure titanium disks (CP Ti) with or without laser surface structuring. Design: In vitro experimental study of PEKK polymer coated material on the CP Ti disks with or without laser surface structuring. Materials and methods: coating the surface of the commercial pure titanium (CP Ti) disks with PEKK polymer was performed via using frictional mode CO2 laser, then the samples disks analyzed by using FESEM. Results: the FESEM reveal good adherence and distribution of the PEKK coated material over the CP Ti substrate by using the frictional mode CO2 laser at 2 watt and 6 ms pulse duration. Conclusion: the frictional mode CO2 laser considered an

An atomic force microscope (AFM) technique is utilized to investigate the polystyrene (PS) impact upon the morphological properties of the outer as well as inner surface of poly vinyl chloride (PVC) porous fibers. Noticeable a new shape of the nodules at the outer and inner surfaces, namely "Crater nodules", has been observed. The fibers surface images have seen to be regular nodular texture at the skin of the inner and outer surfaces at low PS content. At PS content of 6 wt.%, the nodules structure was varied from Crater shape to stripe. While with increasing of PS content, the pore density reduces as a result of increasing the size of the pore at the fiber surface. Moreover, the test of 3D-AFM images shows that the roughness of both su

Abstract

Much attention has been paid for the use of robot arm in various applications. Therefore, the optimal path finding has a significant role to upgrade and guide the arm movement. The essential function of path planning is to create a path that satisfies the aims of motion including, averting obstacles collision, reducing time interval, decreasing the path traveling cost and satisfying the kinematics constraints. In this paper, the free Cartesian space map of 2-DOF arm is constructed to attain the joints variable at each point without collision. The D*algorithm and Euclidean distance are applied to obtain the exact and estimated distances to the goal respectively. The modified Particle Swarm Optimization al

This paper describes a new finishing process using magnetic abrasives were newly made to finish effectively brass plate that is very difficult to be polished by the conventional machining processes. Taguchi experimental design method was adopted for evaluating the effect of the process parameters on the improvement of the surface roughness and hardness by the magnetic abrasive polishing. The process parameters are: the applied current to the inductor, the working gap between the workpiece and the inductor, the rotational speed and the volume of powder. The analysis of variance(ANOVA) was analyzed using statistical software to identify the optimal conditions for better surface roughness and hardness. Regressions models based on statistical m

     Community detection is an important and interesting topic for better understanding and analyzing complex network structures. Detecting hidden partitions in complex networks is proven to be an NP-hard problem that may not be accurately resolved using traditional methods. So it is solved using evolutionary computation methods and modeled in the literature as an optimization problem.  In recent years, many researchers have directed their research efforts toward addressing the problem of community structure detection by developing different algorithms and making use of single-objective optimization methods. In this study, we have continued that research line by improving the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm using a

A sensitive and accurate colorimetric method was developed for the determination of the Sitagliptin phosphate monohydrate, here and after will be named Sitagliptin, in its pure and pharmaceutical form. The suggested approach is based on boosting the sensitivity of the traditional spectrometric methods by derivatizing Sitagliptin into a colored product that absorbs the visible spectrum at 573 nm. The proposed method has effectively improved the sensitivity and the limit of detection for the analysis of Sitagliptin. A linear calibration curve was obtained over the concentration range of 0.1-10 μg/ml with a correlation coefficient of 0.9983. The calculated recovery was within the range of 98.98–100.11%. While the limit of detection LOD and