Pharmaceuticals have been widely remaining contaminants in wastewater, and diclofenac is the most common pharmaceutical pollutant. Therefore, the removal of diclofenac from aqueous solutions using activated carbon produced by pyrocarbonic acid and microwaves was investigated in this research. Apricot seed powder and pyrophosphoric acid (45 wt%) were selected as raw material and activator respectively, and microwave irradiation technique was used to prepare the activated carbon. The raw material was impregnated in pyrophosphoric acid at 80◦C with an impregnation ratio of 1: 3 (apricot seeds to phosphoric acid), the impregnation time was 4 h, whereas the power of the microwave was 700 watts with a radiation time of 20 min. A series o
... Show MoreThis research investigates manganese (Mn) extraction from Electric Arc Furnace Steel Slag (EAFS) by using the Liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) method. The chemical analysis was done on the slag using X-ray fluorescence, X-ray diffraction, and atomic absorption spectroscopy. This work consisted of two parts: the first was an extensive study of the effect of variables that can affect the leaching process rate for Mn element from slag (reaction time, nitric acid concentration, solid to liquid ratio, and stirring speed), and the second part evaluates the extraction of Mn element from leached solution. The results showed the possibility of leaching 83.5 % of Mn element from the slag at a temperature of 25°C, nitric acid co
... Show MoreThe improvement in Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation when the received signals impinge on Active-Parasitic Antenna (APA) arrays will be studied in this work. An APA array consists of several active antennas; others are parasitic antennas. The responses to the received signals are measured at the loaded terminals of the active element. The terminals of the parasitic element are shorted. The effect of the received signals on the parasites, i.e., the induced short-circuit current, is mutually coupled to the active elements. Eigen decomposition of the covariance matrix of the measurements of the APA array generates a third subspace in addition to the traditional signal and noise subspaces generated by the all-active ante
... Show MoreWater quality planning relies on Biochemical Oxygen Demand BOD. BOD testing takes five days. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is increasingly used for water resource forecasting. This work designed a PSO technique for estimating everyday BOD at Al-Rustumiya wastewater treatment facility inlet. Al-Rustumiya wastewater treatment plant provided 702 plant-scale data sets during 2012-2022. The PSO model uses the daily data of the water quality parameters, including chemical oxygen demand (COD), chloride (Cl-), suspended solid (SS), total dissolved solids (TDS), and pH, to determine how each variable affects the daily incoming BOD. PSO and multiple linear regression (MLR) findings are compared, and their perfor
... Show MoreSeveral stress-strain models were used to predict the strengths of steel fiber reinforced concrete, which are distinctive of the material. However, insufficient research has been done on the influence of hybrid fiber combinations (comprising two or more distinct fibers) on the characteristics of concrete. For this reason, the researchers conducted an experimental program to determine the stress-strain relationship of 30 concrete samples reinforced with two distinct fibers (a hybrid of polyvinyl alcohol and steel fibers), with compressive strengths ranging from 40 to 120 MPa. A total of 80% of the experimental results were used to develop a new empirical stress-strain model, which was accomplished through the application of the parti
... Show MoreCircular thin walled structures have wide range of applications. This type of structure is generally exposed to different types of loads, but one of the most important types is a buckling. In this work, the phenomena of buckling was studied by using finite element analysis. The circular thin walled structure in this study is constructed from; cylindrical thin shell strengthen by longitudinal stringers, subjected to pure bending in one plane. In addition, Taguchi method was used to identify the optimum combination set of parameters for enhancement of the critical buckling load value, as well as to investigate the most effective parameter. The parameters that have been analyzed were; cylinder shell thickness, shape of stiffeners section an
... Show More