motbanner.jpg

Fabrication of bio-plastic composite pellets from agricultural waste and food waste

This study aims to produce starch bioplastic pellets from food waste such as potato peels. Measuring the ease of flow of the melt is crucial for producing these pellets. The melt flow index (MFI) is measured in this study to evaluate the consistency of the produced pellets and determine the extent of degradation of the plastic because of molding. This study investigates the effect of adding different fillers to the starch matrix on reducing the MFI value. The fillers used in this work are nano chitosan, nano potato peel, and micro cellulose fillers. The fillers were used with different

Agriculture and Crops
Mechanical Design

Cold flow numerical simulation inside local pottery furnace for different designs for the air inlet

One of the many pleasures of living in Egypt is having the opportunity to visit places like a village called Tunis in El-Fayoum governorate which is a touristic village and export art and handicraft such as Pottery for 3-4 decades. The clay processing in the traditional pottery industry contains several stages. The process and quality of the pottery have to be improved to reduce pollution and the manufacturing round time which could be done through improving the heating process. Towards this goal, turbulent three-dimensional numerical simulations for the in-use air inlet and a modified design

Healthcare
Software and Communications
Agriculture and Crops

The effective antagonistic potential of plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria against Alternaria solani-causing early blight disease in tomato plant

Tomato plants can be infected by several diseases, among them, the early blight disease, caused by the necrotrophic fungus Alternaria solani is very dangerous. Plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) are enhanced the plant growth and suppress plant diseases. The current study was conducted in a pot experiment to investigate the bio-efficacy antagonistic bacterial isolates as either individual or combination against tomato early blight disease. Disease severity and protection percent, morphological indicators as well as yield characters were recorded. In vitro antagonistic activity assay of

Agriculture and Crops

Optimizing inspection policies for buried municipal pipe infrastructure

Condition assessment is an integral component in any infrastructure asset management system. Without condition information, asset managers lack the ability to make appropriate decisions regarding needed maintenance, rehabilitation, and replacement of infrastructure. Existing and emerging technologies for assessing the condition of water and sewer pipes provide a better picture of the state of these buried assets. Unfortunately, many of these technologies are costly and provide results that are not always highly reliable. This paper presents a methodology to assist asset managers in balancing

Artificial Intelligence
Energy and Water
Agriculture and Crops

Leveraging primary feedback and spectrum sensing for cognitive access

We consider a time-slotted primary system where both the primary channel and primary activity are modeled as two independent two-state Markov chains. The primary transmitter can be idle or busy, whereas the channel can be in erasure or not. Moreover, the sensing channel between the primary transmitter and secondary transmitter is modeled as a two-state Markov chain to represent two levels of sensing reliability. At the beginning of each time slot, the secondary transmitter may remain idle, transmit directly, or probe the channel and access the channel only if it is sensed to be free. At the

Healthcare
Software and Communications
Agriculture and Crops

Improved Semantic Segmentation of Low-Resolution 3D Point Clouds Using Supervised Domain Adaptation

One of the key challenges in applying deep learning to solve real-life problems is the lack of large annotated datasets. Furthermore, for a deep learning model to perform well on the test set, all samples in the training and test sets should be independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), which means that test samples should be similar to the samples that were used to train the model. In many cases, however, the underlying training and test set distributions are different. In such cases, it is common to adapt the test samples by transforming them to their equivalent counterparts in the

Artificial Intelligence
Healthcare
Energy and Water
Software and Communications
Agriculture and Crops
Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Competitiveness

Myocardial segmentation using constrained multi-seeded region growing

Multi-slice short-axis acquisitions of the left ventricle are fundamental for estimating the volume and mass of the left ventricle in cardiac MRI scans. Manual segmentation of the myocardium in all time frames per each cross-section is a cumbersome task. Therefore, automatic myocardium segmentation methods are essential for cardiac functional analysis. Region growing has been proposed to segment the myocardium. Although the technique is simple and fast, non uniform intensity and low-contrast interfaces of the myocardium are major challenges of the technique that limit its use in myocardial

Energy and Water
Agriculture and Crops
Mechanical Design
Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Competitiveness

Labour productivity in building construction: A field study

This paper describes a field study conducted over a period of 11-months on labour productivity observed during the construction of a new university campus in Cairo, Egypt. The campus is being built on 127 acres and the field study was conducted during the construction of two main buildings; each of 20,000 m 2 built up area. The study utilized work sampling (WS), craftsman questionnaire (CQ), and foreman delay survey (FDS) methods to analyze labour productivity of three indicative and labour-intensive trades, namely formwork, masonry work, and HVAC duct installation. The results were also

Energy and Water
Agriculture and Crops
Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Competitiveness

A critical review on green corrosion inhibitors based on plant extracts: Advances and potential presence in the market

Corrosion occurs in all sectors including oil pipelines, drinking water and sewerage in the majority of cases linked to corrosion of steel. Good corrosion management includes optimising corrosion control actions and minimising lifecycle corrosion costs whilst meeting environmental goals. The toxicity of commonly used synthetic inhibitors are the subject of recent legislations (REACH and PARCOM) have led to search on more eco-friendly corrosion inhibitors. Extensive research is conducted to assess the corrosion inhibition rate of diverse green inhibitors. However, it was not adequately

Healthcare
Energy and Water
Agriculture and Crops
Mechanical Design

Determining the effect of changing channel geometry of irrigation canals on dissolved oxygen concentration

Dissolved oxygen (DO) is an important water quality parameter. It is considered the most important parameter. DO concentration in water is affected by different parameters such as volume flow rate, water velocity, and re-aeration rate. Those parameters are directly affected by the geometry of the waterway. Thus, studying the impact of changing channel geometry on DO is very important. Many researchers studied the effect of influential parameters on water quality variables but the influence of channel geometric parameters on DO was not studied thoroughly before. This research aims to study the

Energy and Water
Agriculture and Crops