In this study, a 3 mm thickness 7075-T6 aluminium alloy sheet was used in the friction stir welding process. Using the design of experiment to reduce the number of experiments and to obtain the optimum friction stir welding parameters by utilizing Taguchi technique based on the ultimate tensile test results. Orthogonal array of L9 (3³) was used based on three numbers of the parameters and three levels for each parameter, where shoulder-workpiece interference depth (0.20, 0.25, and 0.3) mm, pin geometry (cylindrical thread flat end, cylindrical thread with 3 flat round end, cylindrical thread round end), and thread pitch (0.8, 1, and 1.2) mm) this technique executed by Minitab 17 software. The results showed th

Background: A global health concern is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). The use of bacteriophages is one of the many novel control strategies against MRSA that are frequently sought. However, it is quite challenging to isolate enough lytic anti-MRSA phages. In order to extract, optimize, and remodel anti-MRSA phages, this study sought novel approaches.

Methods: Two ATCC MRSA strains and nine clinical MRSA isolates were used to isolate wild anti-MRSA phages from hospital settings, dirt, and sewage. The wild phages were optimized using plaque-based biokinetic techniques. Usi

This paper investigates the performance evaluation of two state feedback controllers, Pole Placement (PP) and Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). The two controllers are designed for a Mass-Spring-Damper (MSD) system found in numerous applications to stabilize the MSD system performance and minimize the position tracking error of the system output. The state space model of the MSD system is first developed. Then, two meta-heuristic optimizations, Simulated Annealing (SA) optimization and Ant Colony (AC) optimization are utilized to optimize feedback gains matrix K of the PP and the weighting matrices Q and R of the LQR to make the MSD system reach stabilization and reduce the oscillation of the response. The Matlab softwar

Four rapid, accurate and very simple derivative spectrophotometric techniques were developed for the quantitative determination of binary mixtures of estradiol (E2) and progesterone (PRG) formulated as a capsule. Method I is the first derivative zero-crossing technique, derivative amplitudes were detected at the zero-crossing wavelength of 239.27 and 292.51 nm for the quantification of estradiol and 249.19 nm for Progesterone. Method II is ratio subtraction, progesterone was determined at λmax 240 nm after subtraction of interference exerted by estradiol. Method III is modified amplitude subtraction, which was established using derivative spectroscopy and mathematical manipulations. Method IIII is the absorbance ratio technique, absorba

Background: The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the roots of the maxillary posterior teeth and the maxillary sinus using spiral computed tomography, and measured the distances between the roots of the maxillary posterior teeth and the sinus floor. Materials and Methods: The sample of the present study was a total of 120 Iraqi subject (60 males & 60 females) aged (20-60) years old, who admitted to spiral Computed Tomography scan unit in AL-Zahraa hospital in AL-Kut city to have Computed Tomography scan of the brain and paranasal sinuses who had complaints of headaches or with suspicion of sinusitis but without pathological findings in maxillary sinuses. From November 2012 to April 2013, CT sagittal reconstruc

     The searching process using a binary codebook of combined Block Truncation Coding (BTC) method and Vector Quantization (VQ), i.e. a full codebook search for each input image vector to find the best matched code word in the codebook, requires a long time.   Therefore, in this paper, after designing a small binary codebook, we adopted a new method by rotating each binary code word in this codebook into 900 to 2700 step 900 directions. Then, we systematized each code word depending on its angle  to involve four types of binary code books (i.e. Pour when , Flat when  , Vertical when, or Zigzag). The proposed scheme was used for decreasing the time of the coding procedure, with very small distortion per block, by designing s

تعتبر شبكية العين جزءًا مهمًا من العين لأن الأطباء يستخدمون صورها لتشخيص العديد من أمراض العيون مثل الجلوكوما واعتلال الشبكية السكري وإعتام عدسة العين. في الواقع، يعد تصوير الشبكية المجزأ أداة قوية للكشف عن النمو غير العادي في منطقة العين بالإضافة إلى تحديد حجم وبنية القرص البصري. يمكن أن يؤدي الجلوكوما إلى إتلاف القرص البصري، مما يغير مظهر القرص البصري للعين. تعمل تقنيتنا على الكشف عن الجلوكوما وتصنيفه

Association rules mining (ARM) is a fundamental and widely used data mining technique to achieve useful information about data. The traditional ARM algorithms are degrading computation efficiency by mining too many association rules which are not appropriate for a given user. Recent research in (ARM) is investigating the use of metaheuristic algorithms which are looking for only a subset of high-quality rules. In this paper, a modified discrete cuckoo search algorithm for association rules mining DCS-ARM is proposed for this purpose. The effectiveness of our algorithm is tested against a set of well-known transactional databases. Results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing metaheuristic methods.

This study focused on spectral clustering (SC) and three-constraint affinity matrix spectral clustering (3CAM-SC) to determine the number of clusters and the membership of the clusters of the COST 2100 channel model (C2CM) multipath dataset simultaneously. Various multipath clustering approaches solve only the number of clusters without taking into consideration the membership of clusters. The problem of giving only the number of clusters is that there is no assurance that the membership of the multipath clusters is accurate even though the number of clusters is correct. SC and 3CAM-SC aimed to solve this problem by determining the membership of the clusters. The cluster and the cluster count were then computed through the cluster-wise J