For over a century, the global consumption of asphalt binder in asphalt mixture production has been substantial. In the Heet region (west of Iraq), two distinct forms of natural asphalt (NA) deposits exist: rock asphalt and sulfur spring asphalt. This study focused on using NA sourced from sulfur springs. The aim was to investigate the potential of incorporating NA into local asphalt mixtures. To achieve this, NA was heated to 163°C for varying durations. After heat treatment, laboratory tests were conducted on NA. The findings suggest that by heating NA for 20 hours, it conforms to Iraqi specifications in terms of physical properties. Furthermore, compared to conventional petroleum asphalt, treated NA showed greater

Water pollution is one of the global challenges that the society must address in the 21^st century aiming to improve the water quality, reduce human pollutants and ecosystem health impacts. In phytotoxicity test, the plant of Iresine herbstii was exposed to remove nickel from simulated wastewater using two different ratios (mass of plant to the mass of nickel) (,R_p/Ni) for 21 days with sub-surface batch system. During the exposure period, the removal of Ni concentrations (2, 5 and 10 mg/L) for two mass ratio (2,800 and 34,000) were (83.6%, 77.2%, 78.0%) and (86.8%, 97% and 95.6%), respectively. final result of the rate was found that the highest removal occurred, 97%, at a mass ratio of 34,000 and

Key-frame selection plays an important role in facial expression recognition systems. It helps in selecting the most representative frames that capture the different poses of the face. The effect of the number of selected keyframes has been studied in this paper to find its impact on the final accuracy of the emotion recognition system. Dynamic and static information is employed to select the most effective key-frames of the facial video with a short response time. Firstly, the absolute difference between the successive frames is used to reduce the number of frames and select the candidate ones which then contribute to the clustering process. The static-based information of the reduced sets of frames is then given to the fuzzy C-Means algor

The primary aim of the study was to find out the values of some biomechanical variables for the long serve skill in badminton and to identify the effect of biomechanical feedback on the performance of long serve. The present study had a single group, pre-post experimental study design. The research community was determined by the intentional method of one group with a pre-and post-test. The players of the Assyrian badminton club constituted the research community. A total of 12 players were present in the research community. The badminton players falling within the age group of 15-17 years for the season 2020-2021 were recruited as the participants for the study. A total of five players were selected as the participant

Background: Dietary intakes are critical during pregnancy, because inadequate amounts of key nutrients may compromise fetal development or maternal health. In addition to that maternal diet could be one of the methods to select the gender of the baby. The aim of the study is to correlate the level of the minerals in the mother’s blood with the gender and wellbeing of the baby after delivery.Patients and Methods: Fifty women were involved in this study with a mean age (23.92 ± 4.75), collected from the labor room during labor in the period between December 2013 and May 2014, in Baghdad teaching hospital. After taking a full history from the women, 10 ml of blood was withdrawn from them, 2ml in EDTA tubes for lead estimation and 8 ml in pl

In this work the effect of annealing temperature on the structure and the electrical properties of Bi thin films was studied, the Bi films were deposited on glass substrates at room temperature by thermal evaporation technique with thickness (0.4 µm) and rate of deposition equal to 6.66Å/sec, all samples are annealed in a vacuum for one hour. The X-ray diffraction analysis shows that the prepared samples are polycrystalline and it exhibits hexagonal structure. The electrical properties of these films were studied with different annealing temperatures, the d.c conductivity for films decreases from 16.42 ? 10-2 at 343K to 10.11?10-2 (?.cm)-1 at 363K. The electrical activation energies Ea1 and Ea2 increase from 0.031 to 0.049eV and

An optical video communication system is designed and constructed using pulse frequency modulation (PFM) technique. In this work PFM pulses are generated at the transmitter using voltage control oscillator (VCO) of width 50 ns for each pulse. Double frequency, equal width and narrow pulses are produced in the receiver be for demodulation. The use of the frequency doubling technique in such a system results in a narrow transmission bandwidth (25 ns) and high receiver sensitivity.

In the present work, silver nanoparticles were prepared. Nonlinear optical properties and
optical limiting of silver nanoparticles were investigated.Standard chemical synthesis method was used at
diffrent weight ratio(0.038, 0.058 and 0.078) of silver nitrate. Several testing were done to obtain the
characteristics of the sample. Z-Scan experiments were performed using 30 ns Q-switched Nd:YAG
laser at 1064 nm and 532 nm at different intensities. The results showed that the nonlinear refractive
index is directly proportional to the input intensities, which caused by the self-focusing of the material.
In addition, the optical limiting behavior has been studied. The results showed that the sample could be
used as an opt

The objective of this study is to apply Artificial Neural Network for heat transfer analysis of shell-and-tube heat exchangers widely used in power plants and refineries. Practical data was obtained by using industrial heat exchanger operating in power generation department of Dura refinery. The commonly used Back Propagation (BP) algorithm was used to train and test networks by divided the data to three samples (training, validation and testing data) to give more approach data with actual case. Inputs of the neural network include inlet water temperature, inlet air temperature and mass flow rate of air. Two outputs (exit water temperature to cooling tower and exit air temperature to second stage of air compressor) were taken in ANN.

Background: Lowering the amount of iodinated contrast material and tube voltage may increase pulmonary artery opacification and thrombus identification without compromising picture quality.

Objectives: To explore the efficiency of using lower tube voltage and a lower contrast medium dose for conducting computed tomography for pulmonary angiography (CTPA) aiming to increase its accuracy in detecting pulmonary thromboembolism (PTE).

Subjects and Methods:100 patients scheduled for CTPA with a preoperative diagnosis of PTE were grouped into two: group A, (50 patients) got 1 mL/kg at 120 kV and group B, (50 patients) received 0.5 mL/kg at 80 kV.The tec