PVC/Kaolinite composites were prepared by the melt intercalation method. Mechanical properties, thermal properties, flammability and water absorption percentage of prepared samples were tested. Mechanical characteristic such as tensile strength, elongation at break; hardness and impact strength (charpy type) were measured for all samples. It was found that the tensile strength and elongation at break of PVC composites decreased with increasing kaolinite loading. Also, the hardness of the composites increases with increase in filler content .The impact strength of the composites at the beginning increases at lower kaolinite loadings is due to the lack of kaolin adhesion to the matrix. However, at higher kaolin loadings. This severe agglom

In this article, we developed a new loss function, as the simplification of linear exponential loss function (LINEX) by weighting LINEX function. We derive a scale parameter, reliability and the hazard functions in accordance with upper record values of the Lomax distribution (LD). To study a small sample behavior performance of the proposed loss function using a Monte Carlo simulation, we make a comparison among maximum likelihood estimator, Bayesian estimator by means of LINEX loss function and Bayesian estimator using square error loss (SE) function. The consequences have shown that a modified method is the finest for valuing a scale parameter, reliability and hazard functions.

      In this work, a test room was built in Baghdad city, with (2*1.5*1.5) m³  in dimensions, while the solar chimneys (SC) were designed with aspect ratio (ar) bigger than 12. Test room was supplied by many solar collectors; vertical single side of air pass with ar equals 25, and tilted 45^o double side of air passes with ar equals 50 for each pass, both collectors consist of flat thermal energy storage box collector (TESB) that covered by transparent clear acrylic sheet, third type of collector is array of evacuated tubular collectors with thermosyphon in 45^o instelled  in the bottom of TESB of vertical SC. The TESB was

In this work, we study the effect of doping Sn on the structural and optical properties of pure cadmium oxide films at different concentrations of Tin (Sn) (X=0.1,0.3 and 0.5) .The films prepared by using the laser-induced plasma at wavelength of laser 1064 nm and duration 9 ns under pressure reached to 2.5×10^-2 mbar. The results of X-ray diffraction tests showed that the all prepared films  are polycrystalline. As for the topography of the films surface, it was measured using AFM , where the results showed that the grain size increases with an increase in the percentage of doping  in addition to an increase in the average roughness. The optical properties of all films have also been studied through the absorbance s

BP algorithm is the most widely used supervised training algorithms for multi-layered feedforward neural net works. However, BP takes long time to converge and quite sensitive to the initial weights of a network. In this paper, a modified cuckoo search algorithm is used to get the optimal set of initial weights that will be used by BP algorithm. And changing the value of BP learning rate to improve the error convergence. The performance of the proposed hybrid algorithm is compared with the stan dard BP using simple data sets. The simulation result show that the proposed algorithm has improved the BP training in terms of quick convergence of the solution depending on the slope of the error graph.

Background: One of the most common problem associated with the used of soft denture lining material is microorganisms and fungal growth especially Candida albicans, which can result in chronic mucosal inflammation. The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of chlorhexidine diacetate (CDA) salt Incorporation into soft denture lining material on antifungal activity; against Candida albicans, and the amount of chlorhexidine di-acetate salt leached out of soft liner/CDA composite. Furthermore, evaluate shear bond strength and hardness after CDA addition to soft liner Materials and methods: chlorhexidine diacetate salt was added to soft denture lining material at four different concentrations (0.05%, 0.1% and 0.2% by weight). Four hund