Hard-grade asphalt binders, such as AC 20–30, offer excellent resistance to permanent deformation but are inherently brittle, making them highly susceptible to fatigue and low-temperature cracking. While polymer modification addresses these issues, virgin polymers remain expensive. Despite the growing interest in recycled plastics, the rheological impact of complex waste streams, specifically polyvinyl chloride (PVC) derived from flex banners containing plasticizers, on excessively stiff binders within the complete Superpave Performance Grading (PG) framework remains critically underexplored. This study introduces a novel valorization approach by utilizing solvent-extracted flex banner waste (WPVC) as a dual-action modifier. It leverages

In this research, the problem of multi- objective modal transport was formulated with mixed constraints to find the optimal solution. The foggy approach of the Multi-objective Transfer Model (MOTP) was applied. There are three objectives to reduce costs to the minimum cost of transportation, administrative cost and cost of the goods. The linear membership function, the Exponential membership function, and the Hyperbolic membership function. Where the proposed model was used in the General Company for the manufacture of grain to reduce the cost of transport to the minimum and to find the best plan to transfer the product according to the restrictions imposed on the model.

Abstract  

Magnetic abrasive finishing (MAF) process is one of non-traditional or advanced finishing methods which is suitable for different materials and produces high quality level of surface finish where it uses magnetic force as a machining pressure. A set of experimental tests was planned according to Taguchi orthogonal array (OA) L27 (3⁶) with three levels and six input parameters. Experimental estimation and optimization of input parameters for MAF process for stainless steel type 316 plate work piece, six input parameters including amplitude of tooth pole, and number of cycle between teeth, current, cutting speed, working gap, and finishing time, were performed by design of experiment

By- products of corn starch industry were used to prepare media for propagation the lactic acid bacteria as a natural auxotroph. The by- products used were the corn steep water (S) and gluten extract (G) after a proper treatment to get them ready for media preparation. The results showed that it was possible to replace the peptone and meat extract by gluten extract in MRS medium. The growth was approximately similar to that obtained in standard MRS media. Corn steep water (S) was used as well and the growth enhanced by including Tween – 80 at 1% level. The later media named MZ, which was superior for growing standard and local strains and starters. The MZ medium modified by adding acetate and glacial acetic acid similarly to

The field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of converting an image of text into a machine-readable text format. The classification of Arabic manuscripts in general is part of this field. In recent years, the processing of Arabian image databases by deep learning architectures has experienced a remarkable development. However, this remains insufficient to satisfy the enormous wealth of Arabic manuscripts. In this research, a deep learning architecture is used to address the issue of classifying Arabic letters written by hand. The method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture as a self-extractor and classifier. Considering the nature of the dataset images (binary images), the contours of the alphabet

Free Space Optical (FSO) technology offers highly directional, high bandwidth communication channels. This technology can provide fiber-like data rate over short distances. In order to improve security associated with data transmission in FSO networks, a secure communication method based on chaotic technique is presented. In this paper, we have turned our focus on a specific class of piece wise linear one-dimensional chaotic maps. Simulation results indicate that this approach has the advantage of possessing excellent correlation property. In this paper we examine the security vulnerabilities of single FSO links and propose a solution to this problem by implementing the chaotic signal generator “reconfigurable tent map”. As synchronizat

Improving the environment is a mission that should be conducted by three associates; public authorities, environmentalists and the community. The ignorance of environmental education in Iraq has resulted to an almost environmentally illiterate community, demanding well planned programs to raise their environmental; awareness and education. On the other hand, the decision makers should be well informed about the citizens' environmental preferences to be able to set their priorities for the civil services. Merging the Iraqi citizens in listing their environmental priorities is one of many other approaches for "Environment Education" programs. Globally, such methods have proven to be effective and resulted to widespread understandin

The purpose of the current investigation is to distinguish between working memory ( ) in five patients with vascular dementia ( ), fifteen post-stroke patients with mild cognitive impairment ( ), and fifteen healthy control individuals ( ) based on background electroencephalography (EEG) activity. The elimination of EEG artifacts using wavelet (WT) pre-processing denoising is demonstrated in this study. In the current study, spectral entropy ( ), permutation entropy ( ), and approximation entropy ( ) were all explored. To improve the  classification using the k-nearest neighbors ( NN) classifier scheme, a comparative study of using fuzzy neighbourhood preserving analysis with -decomposition ( ) as a dimensionality reduction technique an

Various speech enhancement Algorithms (SEA) have been developed in the last few decades. Each algorithm has its advantages and disadvantages because the speech signal is affected by environmental situations. Distortion of speech results in the loss of important features that make this signal challenging to understand. SEA aims to improve the intelligibility and quality of speech that different types of noise have degraded. In most applications, quality improvement is highly desirable as it can reduce listener fatigue, especially when the listener is exposed to high noise levels for extended periods (e.g., manufacturing). SEA reduces or suppresses the background noise to some degree, sometimes called noise suppression alg