High tunnels, or unheated plastic greenhouses, are becoming increasingly popular among organic vegetable growers across the United States. However, the intensive production typical of these systems presents soil health challenges, including salinization due to high fertilizer or compost inputs coupled with lack of rainfall to leach salts. Legume cover crops may improve soil health in high tunnels by reducing the need for external inputs, while adding organic matter. We tested the soil health effects of a winter hairy vetch (Vicia villosa Roth) cover crop used to replace fertilizer N in an organic tomato cropping system in high tunnels. Studies were replicated across three sites differing in climate and soil type (Kansas, Kentucky, and Minnesota) over three years. We measured vetch cover crop effects on a suite of soil health indicators, including potentially mineralizable nitrogen (PMN), permanganate oxidizable carbon, and microbial biomass. Preliminary results suggest that vetch effects on PMN were highly variable. Soil mineral N, meanwhile, was often lower in the vetch treatment than in a fertilized control, both in spring and in fall. While further work on vetch effects on crop yields is needed, our results suggest that even legume cover crops such as vetch have the potential to reduce nitrate leaching.
Abstract. In this paper, a high order extended state observer (HOESO) based a sliding mode control (SMC) is proposed for a flexible joint robot (FJR) system in the presence of time varying external disturbance. A composite controller is integrated the merits of both HOESO and SMC to enhance the tracking performance of FJR system under the time varying and fast lumped disturbance. First, the HOESO estimator is constructed based on only one measured state to precisely estimate unknown system states and lumped disturbance with its high order derivatives in the FJR system. Second, the SMC scheme is designed based on such accurate estimations to govern the nominal FJR system by well compensating the estimation errors in the states and the lumped
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Abstract:In this research we prepared nanofibers by electrospinning from poly (Vinyl Alcohol) / TiO2. The spectrum of the solution (Emission) was studied at 772 nm. Several process parameter were Investigated as concentration of PVA, the effect of distance from nozzle tip to the grounded collector (gap distance), and final the effect of high voltage. We find the optimum condition to prepare a narrow nanofibers is at concentration of PVA 16gm, the fiber has 20nm diameter.
The objective of this investigation was to study the effects of a mixture of three arbuscular mycorrhizae (Glomus etunicatum, G. leptotichum and Rhizophagus intraradices) on the development of fusarium wilt disease in tomato plants in the presence and absence of organic matter (peatmoss). Results indicated an increase in mycorrhizal root dry weight especially in the presence of the organic matter, on the other hand this parameter was significantly decreased when Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. Lycopersiciwas added simultaneously with the mycorrhiza, Moreover, mycorrhiza and organic matter significantly reduced the damping off seedling disease, disease severity and rate of infection of tomato leaves and roots caused by the pathogenic fungus, These
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The financial markets are one of the sectors whose data is characterized by continuous movement in most of the times and it is constantly changing, so it is difficult to predict its trends , and this leads to the need of methods , means and techniques for making decisions, and that pushes investors and analysts in the financial markets to use various and different methods in order to reach at predicting the movement of the direction of the financial markets. In order to reach the goal of making decisions in different investments, where the algorithm of the support vector machine and the CART regression tree algorithm are used to classify the stock data in order to determine
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Rutting is one of the major distresses in pavement. The objective of this paper is to develop an improved asphalt binder grading system for Iraq based on the principal of Superpave system, and increasing performance grade of product asphalt binder in Iraq using polymers without raising the viscosity of the binder. Two types of polymers are used, Plastomers, Functionalized Polyethylene (PE) which is developed by asphalt research group in Wisconsin University in the USA, and Elastomers, Styrene Butadiene Styrene (SBS) with and without cross linker. Mastercurve are drown for these modified binders, Rolling thin film aged, to show effects on rheological properties at high temperature for complex modulus (G*) and phas
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