The soap content in biodiesel is an important challenge during the production and purification processing of biodiesel. Natural deep eutectic solvents (NADES) have recently attracted considerable interest as an environmentally suitable substitute for traditional solvents in the biodiesel industry. This work investigates the soap removal from the contaminated biodiesel using NADES. Eight choline chloride‐based deep eutectic solvents (DESs) were screened using the conductor‐like screening model for real solvents (COSMO‐RS) to identify the most suitable solvent for soap removal and were validated experimentally. The effect of NADES molar ratio, NADES:biodiesel ratio, mixing speed and extraction time on the extraction efficiency were investigated. COSMO‐RS screening revealed that the malonic acid‐based NADES possess higher soap elimination, and this is compatible with the experimental screening. The higher extraction efficiency of 99.18% was achieved under the optimum conditions of 1:3 of NADES molar ratio, 1:1 DES:biodiesel, 150 rpm and 15 min of extraction time. The soap removal followed the first‐order kinetic equation with a rate constant of 0.183 min−1. This technique offers innovative and environmentally friendly routes for downstream processing of contaminated biodiesel.
Detection of early clinical keratoconus (KCN) is a challenging task, even for expert clinicians. In this study, we propose a deep learning (DL) model to address this challenge. We first used Xception and InceptionResNetV2 DL architectures to extract features from three different corneal maps collected from 1371 eyes examined in an eye clinic in Egypt. We then fused features using Xception and InceptionResNetV2 to detect subclinical forms of KCN more accurately and robustly. We obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.99 and an accuracy range of 97–100% to distinguish normal eyes from eyes with subclinical and established KCN. We further validated the model based on an independent dataset with
... Show MoreNanosilica was extracted from rice husk, which was locally collected from the Iraqi mill at Al-Mishikhab district in Najaf Governorate, Iraq. The precipitation method was used to prepared Nanosilica powder from rice husk ash, after treating it thermally at 700°C, followed by dissolving the silica in the alkaline solution and getting a sodium silicate solution. Two samples of the final solution were collected to study the effect of filtration on the purity of the sample by X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF). The result shows that the filtered samples have purity above while the non-filtered sample purity was around The structure analysis investigated by the X-ray diffraction (XRD), found that the Nanosilica powder has an amorphous
... Show MoreElectro-kinetic remediation technology is one of the developing technologies that offer great promise for the cleanup of soils contaminated with heavy metals. A numerical model was formulated to simulate copper (Cu) transport under an electric field using one-dimensional diffusion-advection equations describing the contaminant transport driven by chemical and electrical gradients in soil during the electro-kinetic remediation as a function of time and space. This model included complex physicochemical factors affecting the transport phenomena, such as soil pH value, aqueous phase reaction, adsorption, and precipitation. One-dimensional finitedifference computer program successfully predicted meaningful values for soil pH profiles and Cu
... Show MoreA mathematical model was proposed to study the microkinetics of esterification reaction of oleic acid with ethanol over prepared HY zeolite catalyst. The catalyst was prepared from Iraqi kaolin source and its properties were characterized by different techniques. The esterification was done under different temperature (40 to 70˚C) with 6:1 for molar ratio of ethanol to oleic acid and 5 % catalyst loading. The microkinetics study was done over two period of time each period was examined individually to calculate the reaction rate constant and activation energy. The impact of the mass transfer resistance to the reactant was also investigated; two different studies have been accomplished to do this purpose. The e
... Show MoreA mathematical model was proposed to study the microkinetics of esterification reaction of oleic acid with ethanol over prepared HY zeolite catalyst. The catalyst was prepared from Iraqi kaolin source and its properties were characterized by different techniques. The esterification was done under different temperature (40 to 70˚C) with 6:1 for molar ratio of ethanol to oleic acid and 5 % catalyst loading.
The microkinetics study was done over two period of time each period was examined individually to calculate the reaction rate constant and activation energy. The impact of the mass transfer resistance to the reactant was also investigated; two different studies have been accomplished to do this purpose.
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... Show MoreClinical keratoconus (KCN) detection is a challenging and time-consuming task. In the diagnosis process, ophthalmologists must revise demographic and clinical ophthalmic examinations. The latter include slit-lamb, corneal topographic maps, and Pentacam indices (PI). We propose an Ensemble of Deep Transfer Learning (EDTL) based on corneal topographic maps. We consider four pretrained networks, SqueezeNet (SqN), AlexNet (AN), ShuffleNet (SfN), and MobileNet-v2 (MN), and fine-tune them on a dataset of KCN and normal cases, each including four topographic maps. We also consider a PI classifier. Then, our EDTL method combines the output probabilities of each of the five classifiers to obtain a decision b