Catalytic microwave-assisted pyrolysis of biomass is gaining popularity as an alternative to fossil fuels due to health, environmental, climate, and economic issues. This study conducted a catalytic pyrolysis process of the Albizia plant's branches using an Iraqi clay catalyst (bentonite) focusing on the variables including the biomass-particle size, experimental time, microwave power level, and the catalyst-to-biomass ratio. The physical and chemical properties of the resulting biofuel were analyzed presented by HHV, acidity, density, viscosity, GC-MS, FTIR for bio-oil and SEM, EDX, BET, HHV, FTIR for biochar. The study revealed that addition of bentonite as a catalyst led to enhanced production of biogas produced from 5% to 45% and decreased the power level used from 700 W to 450 W. Also, it raised the production of bio-oil generated with less power level and duration time. The addition of catalyst also affected the characteristics of bio-oil produced such as reducing the acidity by increasing its pH from 5 to 5.7, lowering the viscosity from 4.8 to 3.3 cSt, and the density from 1045 to 1039.2 kg/m3. Adding catalyst increased the percentage of aromatic and alcoholic substances in the bio-oil which led to improve the calorific value from 19.5 to 23 MJ/kg. Additionally, the biochar properties also improved, where the surface area and pore volume increased from 0.5512 to 40.384 m2/g and 0.00011 to 0.0361cm3/g respectively. The higher heating value was raised from 23.5 to 25 MJ/kg also. CH4 is also increased from 3.6 to 8.6% which is one of the essential fuel gasses.
Gypseous soils are spread in several regions in the world including Iraq, where it covers more than 28.6% [1] of the surface region of the country. This soil, with high gypsum content causes different problems in construction and strategic projects. As a result of water flow through the soil mass, permeability and chemical arrangement of these soils vary over time due to the solubility and leaching of gypsum. In this study the soil of 36% gypsum content, is taken from one location about 100 km (62 mi) southwest of Baghdad, where the sample is taken from depth (0.5 - 1) m below the natural ground surface and mixed with (3%, 6%, 9%) of Copolymer and Styrene-butadiene Rubber to improve t
One of the most important challenges facing the designers of the sewerage system is the corrosion of sewers due to the influence of sewerage contaminates which lead to failure of the main lines of sewers. In this study, a reference mix of 1: 1.5: 3 was used and the 4% Flocrete PC200 by weight of cement was added to the same mixing ratio in the second mixture. Twenty-four samples were tested for each mixture, 12 of which were used to compression strength test in ages (7, 14 and 28) day and six samples were submerged after 28 days of wet treatment at (5 and 10) % concentrations of sulfuric acid. The other six samples were painted after 28 days of wet treatment with coating Polyurethane and after 24 hours were flooded with a concentrat
... Show MoreThe quality of groundwater in the Al-Hawija area was assessed using a water quality index. Data of nine physico-chemical parameters of 28 groundwater wells were used to calculate the water quality index (WQI). A heterogeneous water quality was reported, where in close proximity to the Lesser Zab River (LZR), it has low WQI values and permissible for human consumptions due to the dilution processes by fresh water; whereas, it becomes deteriorated in areas located far away the river. The values of WQI ranges from 22 to 336, indicating a good to very poor groundwater quality.
This study has applied the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor theory to the analysis of the source and target domains of metaphors that are used in two English nineteenth century sonnets, both written by contemporaneous female poets. The quantitative and qualitative results of the textual analysis have clearly revealed that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet 23 centres around the conceptual mapping of the journey of love and life with that of possession. In contrast, Christina Rossetti’s sonnet Remember tackles the central conceptual mapping of death as a journey in relation to its further experiential connections. In addition, the application of conceptual metaphor theory in identifying the frequencies and densities of metap
... Show MoreThe current research creates an overall relative analysis concerning the estimation of Meixner process parameters via the wavelet packet transform. Of noteworthy presentation relevance, it compares the moment method and the wavelet packet estimator for the four parameters of the Meixner process. In this paper, the research focuses on finding the best threshold value using the square root log and modified square root log methods with the wavelet packets in the presence of noise to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the denoising process for the financial asset market signal. In this regard, a simulation study compares the performance of moment estimation and wavelet packets for different sample sizes. The results show that wavelet p
... Show MoreAdsorption techniques are widely used to remove certain classes of pollutants from wastewater. Phenolic compounds represent one of the problematic groups. Na-Y zeolite has been synthesized from locally available Iraqi kaolin clay. Characterization of the prepared zeolite was made by XRD and surface area measurement using N2 adsorption. Both synthetic Na-Y zeolite and kaolin clay have been tested for adsorption of 4-Nitro-phenol in batch mode experiments. Maximum removal efficiencies of 90% and 80% were obtained using the prepared zeolite and kaolin clay, respectively. Kinetics and equilibrium adsorption isotherms were investigated. Investigations showed that both Langmuir and Freundlich isotherms fit the experimental data quite well. On the
... Show MoreThe assessment of data quality from different sources can be considered as a key challenge in supporting effective geospatial data integration and promoting collaboration in mapping projects. This paper presents a methodology for assessing positional and shape quality for authoritative large-scale data, such as Ordnance Survey (OS) UK data and General Directorate for Survey (GDS) Iraq data, and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) data, with the intention of assessing possible integration. It is based on the measurement of discrepancies among the datasets, addressing positional accuracy and shape fidelity, using standard procedures and also directional statistics. Line feature comparison has been und
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