Pharmaceuticals have been widely remaining contaminants in wastewater, and diclofenac is the most common pharmaceutical pollutant. Therefore, the removal of diclofenac from aqueous solutions using activated carbon produced by pyrocarbonic acid and microwaves was investigated in this research. Apricot seed powder and pyrophosphoric acid (45 wt%) were selected as raw material and activator respectively, and microwave irradiation technique was used to prepare the activated carbon. The raw material was impregnated in pyrophosphoric acid at 80◦C with an impregnation ratio of 1: 3 (apricot seeds to phosphoric acid), the impregnation time was 4 h, whereas the power of the microwave was 700 watts with a radiation time of 20 min. A series of experiments were conducted at constant mixing speed (300 revolutions per minute) to evaluate the effect of experimental factors likes, adsorption time, pH of diclofenac solution, diclofenac initial concentration, and dosage of activated carbon on removal efficiency. The design of experiments (version 13 Stat-Ease) was implemented using the central composite method to define the optimum effect of the process factors on the removal efficiency. The analysis of variance showed that the quadratic model for the experiment was significant with a very low probability value (P- value < 0.0001). The adjusted R2 of the model was 0.9826 and the predicted R2 was 0.9574. Whereas the optimum conditions suggested by the model for the process variable were found to be 150 min, 3.25 pH, 30 mg/L, 0.267g, for adsorption time, pH of diclofenac solution, diclofenac initial concentration, a dosage of activated carbon, respectively and the maximum removal efficiency was found to be 94.6%. The data obtained from the experiments were fitted with Langmuir and Freundlich models and the results show that the data was well fitted Langmuir model with R2 = 0.9685 as compared to the Freundlich model which has R2 = 0.93249. Likewise, the data was analyzed by pseudo first and second-order kinetic models and the results show that the adsorption on apricot-activated carbon was well adequate with the pseudo-second-order model.
The aim of this study is modeling the transport of industrial wastewater in sandy soil by using finite element method. A washing technique was used to remove the industrial wastewater from the soil. The washing technique applied with an efficient hydraulic gradient to help in transport of contaminant mass by advection. Also, the mass transport equation used in modeling the transport of industrial wastewater from soil includes the sorption and chemical reactions. The sandy soil samples obtained from Al-Najaf Governorate/Iraq. The wastewater contaminant was obtained from Al- Musyiebelectricity power plant. The soil samples were synthetically contaminated with four percentages of 10, 20, 30 and 40% of the contaminant and these percentages calc
... Show MoreEchocardiography is a widely used imaging technique to examine various cardiac functions, especially to detect the left ventricular wall motion abnormality. Unfortunately the quality of echocardiograph images and complexities of underlying motion captured, makes it difficult for an in-experienced physicians/ radiologist to describe the motion abnormalities in a crisp way, leading to possible errors in diagnosis. In this study, we present a method to analyze left ventricular wall motion, by using optical flow to estimate velocities of the left ventricular wall segments and find relation between these segments motion. The proposed method will be able to present real clinical help to verify the left ventricular wall motion diagnosis.
This work aims to investigate the inhibition of vitality of Streptococcus mutans, which is the causative agent of caries. A 632.8 nm He-Ne laser with the output power of 4.5mW was used in combination with toluidine blue O (TBO) at the concentration of 50μg/ml as a photosensitizer. Streptococcus mutans was isolated from 35 patients if carious teeth. Three isolates were chosen and exposed to different energy densities of He – Ne laser light 3.8, 11.7, 34.5 and 104.1 J/cm². After irradiation, substantial reduction was observed in the number of colony forming units (CFU)/ ml. The reduction in the number of CFU was increasing as the dose increased.
Zinc Oxide (ZnO) is considered as one of the best materials already used as a window layer in solar cells due to its antireflective capability. The ZnO/MgF2 bilayer thin film is more efficient as antireflective coating. In this work, ZnO and ZnO/MgF2 thin films were deposited on glass substrate using pulsed laser deposition and thermal evaporation deposition methods. The optical measurements indicated that ZnO thin layer has an energy gap of (3.02 eV) while ZnO/MgF2 bilayer gives rise to an increase in the energy gap. ZnO/MgF2 bilayer shows a high energy gap (3.77 eV) with low reflectance (1.1-10 %) and refractive index (1.9) leading to high transmittance, this bilayer could be a good candidate optical material to improve the performance
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