Durability of hot mix asphalt (HMA) against moisture damage is mostly related to asphalt-aggregate adhesion. The objective of this work is to find the effect of nanoclay with montmorillonite (MMT) on Marshall properties and moisture susceptibility of asphalt mixture. Two types of asphalt cement, AC(40-50) and AC(60-70) were modified with 2%, 4% and 6% of Iraqi nanoclay with montmorillonite. The Marshall properties, Tensile strength ratio(TSR) and Index of retained strength(ISR) were determined in this work. The total number of specimens was 216 and the optimum asphalt content was 4.91% and 5% for asphalt cement (40-50) and (60-70) respectively. The results showed that the modification of asphalt cement with MMT led to increase Marsh

Poly(L-lactic acid) (PLLA)/poly(caprolactone) (PCL) and two types of organoclay (OMMT) including a fatty amide and ocatdecylamine montmorillonite (FA-MMT and ODA-MMT) were employed to produce polymer nanocomposites by melt blending. Materials were characterized using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), elemental analysis, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Mechanical properties were also investigated for these nanocomposites. The nanocomposites showed increasing mechanical properties and thermal stability. XRD results indicated that the materials formed nanocomposites. SEM morphology showed that increasing content of OMMT reduc

Tor (The Onion Routing) network was designed to enable users to browse the Internet anonymously. It is known for its anonymity and privacy security feature against many agents who desire to observe the area of users or chase users’ browsing conventions. This anonymity stems from the encryption and decryption of Tor traffic. That is, the client’s traffic should be subject to encryption and decryption before the sending and receiving process, which leads to delay and even interruption in data flow. The exchange of cryptographic keys between network devices plays a pivotal and critical role in facilitating secure communication and ensuring the integrity of cryptographic procedures. This essential process is time-consuming, which causes del

This paper proposes a collaborative system called Recycle Rewarding System (RRS), and focuses on the aspect of using information communication technology (ICT) as a tool to promote greening. The idea behind RRS is to encourage recycling collectors by paying them for earning points. In doing so, both the industries and individuals reap the economical benefits of such system. Finally, and more importantly, the system intends to achieve a green environment for the Earth. This paper discusses the design and implementation of the RRS, involves: the architectural design, selection of components, and implementation issues. Five modules are used to construct the system, namely: database, data entry, points collecting and recording, points reward

Energy efficiency is a significant aspect in designing robust routing protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A reliable routing protocol has to be energy efficient and adaptive to the network size. To achieve high energy conservation and data aggregation, there are two major techniques, clusters and chains. In clustering technique, sensor networks are often divided into non-overlapping subsets called clusters. In chain technique, sensor nodes will be connected with the closest two neighbors, starting with the farthest node from the base station till the closest node to the base station. Each technique has its own advantages and disadvantages which motivate some researchers to come up with a hybrid routing algorit

With the rapid development of smart devices, people's lives have become easier, especially for visually disabled or special-needs people. The new achievements in the fields of machine learning and deep learning let people identify and recognise the surrounding environment. In this study, the efficiency and high performance of deep learning architecture are used to build an image classification system in both indoor and outdoor environments. The proposed methodology starts with collecting two datasets (indoor and outdoor) from different separate datasets. In the second step, the collected dataset is split into training, validation, and test sets. The pre-trained GoogleNet and MobileNet-V2 models are trained using the indoor and outdoor se

The development of Web 2.0 has improved people's ability to share their opinions. These opinions serve as an important piece of knowledge for other reviewers. To figure out what the opinions is all about, an automatic system of analysis is needed. Aspect-based sentiment analysis is the most important research topic conducted to extract reviewers-opinions about certain attribute, for instance opinion-target (aspect). In aspect-based tasks, the identification of the implicit aspect such as aspects implicitly implied in a review, is the most challenging task to accomplish. However, this paper strives to identify the implicit aspects based on hierarchical algorithm incorporated with common-sense knowledge by means of dimensionality reduction.

Rock mechanical properties are critical parameters for many development techniques related to tight reservoirs, such as hydraulic fracturing design and detecting failure criteria in wellbore instability assessment. When direct measurements of mechanical properties are not available, it is helpful to find sufficient correlations to estimate these parameters. This study summarized experimentally derived correlations for estimating the shear velocity, Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, and compressive strength. Also, a useful correlation is introduced to convert dynamic elastic properties from log data to static elastic properties. Most of the derived equations in this paper show good fitting to measured data, while some equations show scatters

Copula modeling is widely used in modern statistics. The boundary bias problem is one of the problems faced when estimating by nonparametric methods, as kernel estimators are the most common in nonparametric estimation. In this paper, the copula density function was estimated using the probit transformation nonparametric method in order to get rid of the boundary bias problem that the kernel estimators suffer from. Using simulation for three nonparametric methods to estimate the copula density function and we proposed a new method that is better than the rest of the methods by five types of copulas with different sample sizes and different levels of correlation between the copula variables and the different parameters for the function. The