Anaerobic digestion (AD) is the most common process for dealing with primary and secondary wastewater sludge. In the present work, four pre-treatment methods (ultrasonic, chemical, thermal, and thermo-chemical) are investigated in Al-Rustumya Wastewater Treatment plant in order to find their effect on biogas production and volatile solid removal efficiency during anaerobic digestion.
Two frequencies of ultrasonic wave were used 30 KHz and 50 KHz during the pre-treatment. Sodium hydroxide was added in different amounts to give three pH values of 9, 10 and 11 in chemical pre-treating processes. The sludge was heated at 60oC and 80oC through thermal pre-treatment experiment. Also, the sludge was treated thermo-chemically at 80 oC and pH

   Pyrolysis of virgin polyethylene plastics was studied in order to produce hydrocarbon liquid fuel. The pyrolysis process carried out for low and high-density polyethylene plastics in open system batch reactor in temperature range of 370 to 450°C.

   Thermo-gravimetric analysis of the virgin plastics showed that the degradation ranges were between 326 and 495 °C. The results showed that the optimum temperature range of pyrolysis of polyethylene plastics that gives highest liquid yield (with specific gravity between 0.7844 and 0.7865) was 390 to 410 °C with reaction time of about 35 minutes. Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy gave a quite evidence that the produced hydrocarbon liquid fuel consisted ma

Esterification reaction is most important reaction in biodiesel production. In this study, oleic acid was used as a suggested feedstock to study and simulate production of biodiesel. Batch esterification of oleic acid was carried out at operating conditions; temperature from 40 to 70 °C, ethanol to oleic acid molar ratio from 1/1 to 6/1, H2SO4 as the catalyst 1 and 5% wt of oleic acid, reaction time up to 180 min. The optimum conditions for the esterification reaction were molar ratio of ethanol/oleic acid 6/1, 5%wt H2SO4 relative to oleic acid, 70 °C, 90 min and conversion of oleic 0.92. The activation energy for the suggested model was 26625 J/mole for forward reaction and 42189 J/mole for equilibrium constant. The obtained results s

Many oil and gas processes, including oil recovery, oil transportation, and petroleum processing, are negatively impacted by the precipitation and deposition of asphaltene. Screening methods for determining the stability of asphaltenes in crude oil have been developed due to the high cost of remediating asphaltene deposition in crude oil production and processing. The colloidal instability index, the Asphaltene-resin ratio, the De Boer plot, and the modified colloidal instability index were used to predict the stability of asphaltene in crude oil in this study. The screening approaches were investigated in detail, as done for the experimental results obtained from them. The factors regulating the asphaltene precipitation are different fr

In this study, successive electrocoagulation (EC) and electro-oxidation (EO) processes were used to minimize some of the major pollutants in real wastewater, such as organics (detected by chemical oxygen demand (COD)), and turbidity. The wastewater utilized in the present study was collected from the Midland Refinery Company in Baghdad-Iraq. The performance of the successive batch EC-EO processes was studied by utilizing Graphite and Aluminum (Al) as monopolar anode electrodes and stainless steel (st.st.) as the cathode. The Taguchi experimental design approach was used to attain the best experimental conditions for COD reduction as a major response. Starting from chemical oxygen demand COD of (600 ppm), the effects of current density (C

Exploitation of mature oil fields around the world has forced researchers to develop new ways to optimize reservoir performance from such reservoirs. To achieve that, drilling horizontal wells is an effective method. The effectiveness of this kind of wells is to increase oil withdrawal. The objective of this study is to optimize the location, design, and completion of a new horizontal well as an oil producer to improve oil recovery in a real field located in Iraq. “A” is an oil and gas condensate field located in the Northeast of Iraq. From field production history, it is realized the difficulty to control gas and water production in this kind of complex carbonate reservoir with vertical producer wells. In this study, a horizont

One of the most important virulence factors in Pseudomonas aeruginosa is biofilm formation, as it works as a barrier for entering antibiotics into the bacterial cell. Different environmental and nutritional conditions were used to optimize biofilm formation using microtitre plate assay by P. aeruginosa. The low nutrient level of the medium represented by tryptic soy broth (TSB) was better in biofilm formation than the high nutrient level of the medium with Luria Broth (LB). The optimized condition for biofilm production at room temperature (25 °C) is better than at host temperature (37 °C). Moreover, the staining with 0.1% crystal violet and reading the biofilm with wavelength 360 are considered essential factors in

Text Clustering consists of grouping objects of similar categories. The initial centroids influence operation of the system with the potential to become trapped in local optima. The second issue pertains to the impact of a huge number of features on the determination of optimal initial centroids. The problem of dimensionality may be reduced by feature selection. Therefore, Wind Driven Optimization (WDO) was employed as Feature Selection to reduce the unimportant words from the text. In addition, the current study has integrated a novel clustering optimization technique called the WDO (Wasp Swarm Optimization) to effectively determine the most suitable initial centroids. The result showed the new meta-heuristic which is WDO was employed as t

In this study, successive electrocoagulation (EC) and electro-oxidation (EO) processes were used to minimize some of the major pollutants in real wastewater, such as organics (detected by chemical oxygen demand (COD)), and turbidity. The wastewater utilized in the present study was collected from the Midland Refinery Company in Baghdad-Iraq. The performance of the successive batch EC-EO processes was studied by utilizing Graphite and Aluminum (Al) as monopolar anode electrodes and stainless steel (st.st.) as the cathode. The Taguchi experimental design approach was used to attain the best experimental conditions for COD reduction as a major response. Starting from chemical oxygen demand COD of (600 ppm), the effects of current densi

It has been shown in ionospheric research that calculation of the total electron content (TEC) is an important factor in global navigation system. In this study, TEC calculation was performed over Baghdad city, Iraq, using a combination of two numerical methods called composite Simpson and composite Trapezoidal methods. TEC was calculated using the line integral of the electron density derived from the International reference ionosphere IRI2012 and NeQuick2 models from 70 to 2000 km above the earth surface. The hour of the day and the day number of the year, R12, were chosen as inputs for the calculation techniques to take into account latitudinal, diurnal and seasonal variation of TEC. The results of latitudinal variation of TE