Growth of Penicillium expansum, an ubiquitous mould found in stored fruit globallyt, was significantly restricted by exposure to 48 h cell-free supernatant of two strains of Lactobacillus plantarum (p < 0.001). In addition, the biotransformation of patulin, a toxic secondary metabolite formed by P. expansum, on exposure to L. plantarum cells and cell-free supernatant highlights the potential of this GRAS microbe as a biocontrol agent. Up to 80% of patulin was biotransformed following a 4 h incubation with 1010 cells ml−1 (37 °C) forming E- and Z-ascladiol. The formation of these products was more pronounced at elevated pH and cell density. Exposure to cell free supernatant or sonicated cells resulted in complete patulin biotransformation

Aluminum oxide thin films were prepared by dc reactive sputtering technique using different mixing ratios of argon and oxygen gases (90:10, 70:30, 50:50, 30:70, and 10:90). These films were characterized to introduce their crystalline structures, surface morphology, and elemental composition. A progressive transition occurs from a predominantly amorphous to a highly crystalline Al2O3 film as the oxygen content in the Ar:O2 gas mixture is increased. Increasing the oxygen content leads to a progressive decrease in surface roughness, resulting in smoother and more uniform films with finer granular features. The oxygen-rich environments yield the smoothest surfaces, while argon-rich environments result in significantly rougher surfaces. These f

Pure cadmium oxide films (CdO) and doped with zinc were prepared at different atomic ratios using a pulsed laser deposition technique using an ND-YAG laser from the targets of the pressed powder capsules. X-ray diffraction measurements showed a cubic-shaped of CdO structure. Another phase appeared, especially in high percentages of zinc, corresponding to the hexagonal structure of zinc. The degree of crystallinity, as well as the crystal size, increased with the increase of the zinc ratio for the used targets. The atomic force microscopy measurements showed that increasing the dopant percentage leads to an increase in the size of the nanoparticles, the particle size distribution was irregular and wide, in addition, to increase the surfac

Numerous tests are recently conducted to assess vibration's role in accelerating the heat transfer rate in various heat exchangers. In this work, the enhancement of heat transfer by the effect of transfer vibration and inclination angles on the surface of a double pipe heat exchanger experimentally has been investigated. A data acquisition system is applied to record the data of temperatures, flow rates, and frequencies over the tests. A compound technique was adopted, including the application of a set of inclination angles of (0°, 10°, 20°, and 30°) under the effect of frequency of vibration ranging from sub-resonance to over-resonance frequencies. The results showed that the overall heat transfer coefficient enhan

This study was conducted to determine the ability of water treatment system (Vortisand) to reduce some chemical and physical properties for tigris river raw water, It consisted of turbidity, electrical conductivity, pH, total hardness, calcium Hardness as well as temperature in order to determine the unit`s efficiency for reducing their concentration as compared to those in the water produced by some classical potable water projects (Dora and Wathba) in Baghdad. Samples were collected during the cold months (December 2016 and January 2017) and during the hot months (May and June 2017). The results showed that this system has the ability to reduce some properties such as turbidity, the values were 215NTU in raw water and decreased to NTU

Adsorption experiments were carried out using two different low-cost sorbent materials, date seeds and olive seeds. These sorbents used as a single phase (not as mixture) to remove cadmium ions from simulated wastewater by adsorption process. The equilibrium time was found at 2 hr. The experiments include different parameters such sorbent type and weight and contact time. It was found that both of olive seed and date seed have approximately the same adsorption capacity (qm) with 15.644 mg/g and 15.2112 mg/g, respectively. Equilibrium isotherms and kinetic studies have been carried out. Langmuir isotherm model better fits the experimental data compared with the Freundlich isotherm for olive seed, while Freundlich isotherm fits for date se

New technologies have risen into popularity causing the Liquid membrane techniques to evolve over other separation techniques due to its high selectivity and recovery, increased fluxes, and reduced investment and operating cost. This work focuses on extracting Methylene Blue (MB), a cationic dye using a simple BLM separation technique from its aqueous phase. It combines extraction and stripping in a single unit operation. The feed phase was an aqueous solution of MB, the solvent chosen was soybean oil for the liquid/organic membrane phase, and tri-octyl amine acted as a carrier. The strip phase was a hydrochloric acid solution for this study. A two-phase equilibrium study was done to choose the correct solvent, carrier,

A common approach to the color image compression was started by transform
the red, green, and blue or (RGB) color model to a desire color model, then applying
compression techniques, and finally retransform the results into RGB model In this
paper, a new color image compression method based on multilevel block truncation
coding (MBTC) and vector quantization is presented. By exploiting human visual
system response for color, bit allocation process is implemented to distribute the bits
for encoding in more effective away.
To improve the performance efficiency of vector quantization (VQ),
modifications have been implemented. To combines the simple computational and
edge preservation properties of MBTC with high c