The concrete industry consumes millions of tons of aggregate comprising of natural sands and gravels, each year. In recent years there has been an increasing trend towards using recycled aggregate to save natural resources and to produce lightweight concrete. This study investigates the possibility of using waste plastic as one of the components of lead-acid batteries to replace the fine aggregate by 50 and 70% by volume of concrete masonry units. Compared to the reference concrete mix, results demonstrated that a reduction of approximately 32.5% to 39.6% in the density for replacement of 50% to 70% respectively. At 28 days curing age, the compressive strength was decreased while the water absorption increased by increas

Polyaniline (PANI) and Ag/PANI nanocomposite thin films have prepared by microwave induced plasma. The Ag powder of average particle size of 50 nm, were used to prepare Ag/PANI nanocomposite thin films. The Ag/PANI nanocomposite thin films prepared by polymerization in plasma and characterized by UV-VIS, FTIR, AFM and SEM to study the effect of silver nanoparticles on the optical properties, morphology and structure of the thin films. The optical properties studies showed that the energy band gap of the Ag/PANI (5%wt silver) decreased from 3.6 to 3.2 eV, where the substrate location varied from 4.4 to 3.4 cm from the axis of the cylindrical plasma chamber. Also the optical energy gap decreased systematically from 3.3 to 3 eV with increas

Colloidal crystals (opals) made of close-packed polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) were fabricated and grown by Template-Directed methods to obtain porous materials with well-ordered periodicity and interconnected pore systems to manufacture photonic crystals. Opals were made from aqueous suspensions of monodisperse PMMA spheres with diameters between 280 and 415 nm. SEM confirmed the PMMA spheres crystallized uniformly in a face-centered cubic (FCC) array. Optical properties of synthesized pores PMMA were characterized by UV–Visible spectroscopy. It shows that the colloidal crystals possess pseudo photonic band gaps in the visible region. A combination of Bragg’s law of diffraction and Snell’s law of refraction were used to calculate t

Promoting the production of industrially important aromatic chloroamines over transition-metal nitrides catalysts has emerged as a prominent theme in catalysis. This contribution provides an insight into the reduction mechanism of p-chloronitrobenzene (p-CNB) to p-chloroaniline (p-CAN) over the γ-Mo2N(111) surface by means of density functional theory calculations. The adsorption energies of various molecularly adsorbed modes of p-CNB were computed. Our findings display that, p-CNB prefers to be adsorbed over two distinct adsorption sites, namely, Mo-hollow face-centered cubic (fcc) and N-hollow hexagonal close-packed (hcp) sites with adsorption energies of −32.1 and −38.5 kcal/mol, respectively. We establish that the activation of nit

The ability to produce load-bearing masonry units adopting ACI 211.1 mix design using (1:3.2:2.5) as (cement: fine aggregate: coarse aggregate) with slump range (25-50mm) which can conform (dimension, absorption, and compressive strength) within IQS 1077/1987 requirements type A was our main goal of the study. The ability to use low cement content (300 kg/m3) to handle our market price products since the most consumption in wall construction for low-cost buildings was encouraging. The use of (10 and 20%) of LECA as partial volume replacement of coarse aggregate to reduce the huge weight of masonry blocks can also be recommended. The types of production of the load-bearing masonry units were A and B for (

The specific activity of 29 soil samples collected from Fuel
Fabrication Facility FFF at AL-Tuwaitha site, 20 km south of
Baghdad were determined using HPGe detector in a low background
configuration, it's relative efficiency of 40%, and resolution of 2keV
for the 1332 keV gamma ray emission of 60Co. The range of activity
concentrations of 226Ra, 232Th and 40K were between (12.56-31.96),
(10.2-18.4) and (47.47-402.1) Bq/kg respectively. In order to assess
any radiological hazard to human health, the absorbed gamma dose
rate D in air at 1m above the ground surface was calculated in the
range (18.87 to 36.46) nGy/h; the outdoor annual effective dose
equivalent AEDE was evaluated to vary from 0.0039 to 0.0076

This paper presents a meta-heuristic swarm based optimization technique for solving robot path planning. The natural activities of actual ants inspire which named Ant Colony Optimization. (ACO) has been proposed in this work to find the shortest and safest path for a mobile robot in different static environments with different complexities. A nonzero size for the mobile robot has been considered in the project by taking a tolerance around the obstacle to account for the actual size of the mobile robot. A new concept was added to standard Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for further modifications. Simulations results, which carried out using MATLAB 2015(a) environment, prove that the suggested algorithm outperforms the standard version of AC

This paper is dealing with non-polynomial spline functions "generalized spline" to find the approximate solution of linear Volterra integro-differential equations of the second kind and extension of this work to solve system of linear Volterra integro-differential equations. The performance of generalized spline functions are illustrated in test examples

The brief description to the theory of propagation of electromagnetic waves in plasma was done. The cutoff and resonance regions have been showed. The principles of plasma heating at electron cyclotron resonance (ECRH) method have been mentioned. The numerical simulation to three different station: Tosca station in United Kingdom, ISX-B station in USA and T-10 station in Russia had been done. The optical depth and the friction of energy absorbed A have been calculated. The simulation results indicate that both and A are increase with size of the tokamak and it is possible to obtain full absorption in large tokamak.

lar water heating systems with heat pipes of three diameter groups of 16, 22 and 28.5 mm. The first and third groups had evaporator lengths of 1150, 1300 and 1550 mm. The second group had an additional length of 1800 mm. all heat pipes were of fixed condenser length of 200 mm. Ethanol at 50% fill charge ratio of the evaporator volume was used as the heat pipes working fluid. Each heat pipe condenser section was inserted in a storage tank and the evaporator section inserted into an evacuated glass tube of the Owens- Illinois type. The combined heat pipe and evacuated glass tube form an active solar collector of a unique design.
The resulting ten solar water heating systems were tested outdoors under the meteorological conditions of Bag