Asphalt Hot Mix (HMA) is mainly applied in highway construction in Iraq because of its economic advantage and easy maintenance. Various factors impact the performance of HMA in the field. It is one of the significant impacts on aggregate gradation. The Universal Specification for Roads and Bridges in Iraq (SCRB) limits the different types of asphalt layers and allows for designed tolerance aggregate gradation. It is quite hard for contractors in the present asphalt industries to achieve the required job mix because of sieves' control problems. This study focuses on the effects on the required specification performance of aggregate deviations by using original and modified asphalt binder with AC(40-50) and

Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR)-based plastic optical fiber sensor for estimating the concentration and refractive index of sugar in human blood serum. The sensor is fabricated by a small part (10mm) of optical fiber in the middle is embedded in a resin block and then the polishing process is done, after that it is deposited with about (40nm) thickness of gold metal. The blood serum is placed on gold coated core of an Optical grade plastic optical fiber of 980 µm core diameter.

Using the Neural network as a type of associative memory will be introduced in this paper through the problem of mobile position estimation where mobile estimate its location depending on the signal strength reach to it from several around base stations where the neural network can be implemented inside the mobile. Traditional methods of time of arrival (TOA) and received signal strength (RSS) are used and compared with two analytical methods, optimal positioning method and average positioning method. The data that are used for training are ideal since they can be obtained based on geometry of CDMA cell topology. The test of the two methods TOA and RSS take many cases through a nonlinear path that MS can move through that region. The result

In recent days, the escalating need to seamlessly transfer data traffic without discontinuities across the Internet network has exerted immense pressure on the capacity of these networks. Consequently, this surge in demand has resulted in the disruption of traffic flow continuity. Despite the emergence of intelligent networking technologies such as software-defined networking, network cloudification, and network function virtualization, they still need to improve their performance. Our proposal provides a novel solution to tackle traffic flow continuity by controlling the selected packet header bits (Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP)) that govern the traffic flow priority. By setting the DSCP bits, we can determine the appropriate p

In the literature, several correlations have been proposed for bubble size prediction in bubble columns. However these correlations fail to predict bubble diameter over a wide range of conditions. Based on a data bank of around 230 measurements collected from the open literature, a correlation for bubble sizes in the homogenous region in bubble columns was derived using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) modeling. The bubble diameter was found to be a function of six parameters: gas velocity, column diameter, diameter of orifice, liquid density, liquid viscosity and liquid surface tension. Statistical analysis showed that the proposed correlation has an Average Absolute Relative Error (AARE) of 7.3 % and correlation coefficient of 92.2%. A

Abstract: The development of highly sensitive sensors has become an efficient field of research. In this work, an ArF Excimer laser of 193 nm with a maximum pulse energy of 275 mJ, 15 ns pulse duration and a repetition rate of 1 Hz is utilized to form a Laser Induced Periodic Surface Structures (LIPSS) of three different morphologies (nanochains, contours, grooves) on surface of CR39 polymer at a fluence range above the ablation threshold (250 mJ/cm2). The laser ablated polymer surface is then Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) activated by deposition of a gold layer of 30 nm thickness. The capability of the produced substrate for surface enhanced Raman scattering is evaluated through thiophenol as an analyte molecule. It is observ

Single mode-no core-single mode fiber structure with a section of tuned no-core fiber diameter to sense changes in relative humidity has been experimentally demonstrated. The sensor performance with tuned NCF diameter was investigated to maximize the evanescent fields. Different tuned diameters of of (100, 80, and 60)μm were obtained by chemical etching process based on hydrofluoric acid immersion. The highest wavelength sensitivity was obtained 184.57 pm/RH% in the RH range of 30% –100% when the no-core fiber diameter diameter was 60 μm and the sensor response was in real-time measurements

Photonic crystal fiber interferometers are used in many sensing applications. In this work, an in-reflection photonic crystal fiber (PCF) based on Mach-Zehnder (micro-holes collapsing) (MZ) interferometer, which exhibits high sensitivity to different volatile organic compounds (VOCs), without the needing of any permeable material. The interferometer is robust, compact, and consists of a stub photonic crystal fiber of large-mode area, photonic crystal fiber spliced to standard single mode fiber (SMF) (corning-28), this splicing occurs with optimized splice loss 0.19 dB In the splice regions the voids of the holey fiber are completely collapsed, which allows the excitation and recombination of core and cladding modes. The device reflection

The refractive index sensors based on tapered optical fiber are attractive for many industries due to sensing capability in a variety of application. In this paper, we proposed a refractive index sensor based on multicore fiber (MCF) sandwiched between two standard single mode fibers (SMF). The sensor consisting of three sections, SMF- MCF-SMF is structurally simple and can be easily produced by joining these parts. The MFC contains seven cores and these cores are surrounded by a single cladding. The sensing region is obtained by tapering the MCF section where the evanescent field is generated. The single mode propagating along the SMF is stimulated at the first joint and is coupled to the cladding modes. These modes interfere with the core