One of the most severe problems with flexible asphalt pavements is permanent deformation in the form of rutting. Accordingly, the practice of adding fiber elements to asphalt mix to improve performance under dynamic loading has grown significantly in order to prevent rutting distress and ensure a safe and long-lasting road surface. This paper explores the effects of a combination of ceramic fiber (CF), a low-cost, easily available mineral fiber, and thermal insulator fiber reinforced to enhance the Marshall properties and increase the rutting resistance of asphalt mixes at high temperatures. Asphalt mixtures with 0%, 0.75%, 1.5%, and 2.25% CF content were prepared, and Marshall stability and wheel tracking tests were employed to study the effect of added CF on asphalt mixture performance. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) were also used to investigate the morphologies of CF and reinforced asphalt mixtures and to identify the mechanism of improvement .According to the study results, the ideal ceramic fiber content was 1.5%, which yielded an improve in Marshall stability and reduced rut depth by 22.05% and 27.71% at temperatures of 50°C and 60°C, respectively, when compared to asphalt mixtures without CF. Microscopic analyses clearly revealed the surface properties, particle diameter size, and fiber distribution of the reinforced mixture, including the network structure and strength mechanism, which improved the performance of the asphalt mixture by forming a three-dimensional network.
Ziegler and Nichols proposed the well-known Ziegler-Nichols method to tune the coefficients of PID controller. This tuning method is simple and gives fixed values for the coefficients which make PID controller have weak adaptabilities for the model parameters variation and changing in operating conditions. In order to achieve adaptive controller, the Neural Network (NN) self-tuning PID control is proposed in this paper which combines conventional PID controller and Neural Network learning capabilities. The proportional, integral and derivative (KP, KI, KD) gains are self tuned on-line by the NN output which is obtained due to the error value on the desired output of the system under control. The conventio
... Show MoreThe current study is concerned with investigating the difficulties that Iraqi EFL learners of English may face when translating English collective nouns. Such collective nouns as committee, government, , jury , Parliament , etc. are considered singular when the concept of the unity as a group is emphasized , but when the concept of the individuals or numbers is emphasized they are treated as plural. A sample of twenty undergraduate students have been selected randomly to translate certain English collective nouns in some selected political texts in order to find out the difficulties they might face in rendering them into Arabic. It is hypothesized that most of the testees have used the singular form rather than the plural ignoring the
... Show MoreMotivation is one of the most important factors that influence students learning and has a great effect on their success and achievement. For this reason, in this paper, the researcher is going to investigate the motivational teaching strategies used by EFL Iraqi school teachers. To achieve the aim of the study, the researcher adapted a questionnaire with some changes and modification’s. This questionnaire with five point scale (always, often, sometimes, rarely and never). To achieve face validity, the questionnaire items are given to a jury of experts. Alpha Cronbach formula is used to achieve the questionnaire reliability. After that, the questionnaire was applied on a sample of 38 teachers during the academic year 2019-2020. Th
... Show MoreThis study seeks to investigate Sinan Antoon’s I’jaam (2004) through applying different theoretical frameworks including those of Althusser (1971) and Foucault (1978). Antoon, considered as one of the most internationally recognized Iraqi writers, wrote this dystopian, war novel in Arabic and translated it to English. Antoon’s emphasis placed on literature acting as an oppositional political voice has, in turn, created its own form of censorship inside the fictional world and outside the actual state censorship during Saadm Hossein reign. Thus, particular political messages within literary texts, like I’jaam, have been received with critical attention. The writing culture in Iraq has established an atmosphere in which literary criti
... Show MoreResearches in the field of evaluation of industrial products emotionally are internationally new and non-existing in the Arabic speaking countries, which is considered the crux of the problem in the current research, in addition to the need of the designers and design students to know how to measure the emotional responses for the industrial product in order to get benefit from them in their designs. The research objective is to get a tool that uses emojis in measuring the emotional responses for the products. The researcher designed an emotional verbal wheel and emojis wheel. The sample of the research consisted of (7) chairs different in design and use, and the respondents were (89) students. The most important results are:
1- Desi
The density functional B3LYP is used to investigate the effect of decorating the silver (Ag) atom on the sensing capability of an AlN nanotube (AlN-NT) in detecting thiophosgene (TP). There is a weak interaction between the pristine AlN-NT and TP with the sensing response (SR) of approximately 9.4. Decoration of the Ag atom into the structure of AlN-NT causes the adsorption energy of TP to decrease from − 6.2 to − 22.5 kcal/mol. Also, the corresponding SR increases significantly to 100.5. Moreover, the recovery time when TP is desorbed from the surface of the Ag-decorated AlN-NT (Ag@AlN-NT) is short, i.e., 24.9 s. The results show that Ag@AlN-NT can selectively detect TP among other gases, such as N2, O2, CO2, CO, and H2O.
The separation of fluid-fluid mixtures is a major issue in various sectors. The liquid-liquid hydro-cyclone has a wide range of applications in various sectors due to its great efficiency in separating fluid mixtures, ease of installation, and low cost. In crude oil production, high water is consumed following the degrading of production quality, high processing costs, costs, and environmental impacts. Axial hydro cyclone is a tool for Downhole Oil/Water Separation (DOWS) in the petroleum production industry, but it has limitations. The main purpose of this work is to simulate the effect of compacting the conventional inline hydro cyclone with a converging-diverging nozzle on the oil/water dynamic flow and the separation process to
... Show MoreIn this paper, we focus on designing feed forward neural network (FFNN) for solving Mixed Volterra – Fredholm Integral Equations (MVFIEs) of second kind in 2–dimensions. in our method, we present a multi – layers model consisting of a hidden layer which has five hidden units (neurons) and one linear output unit. Transfer function (Log – sigmoid) and training algorithm (Levenberg – Marquardt) are used as a sigmoid activation of each unit. A comparison between the results of numerical experiment and the analytic solution of some examples has been carried out in order to justify the efficiency and the accuracy of our method.
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