Uncertainty on the condition of the weather always give a major headache to the agricultural industry as the cultivated plant that is grown on a large scale commercially rely on the condition of the weather. Therefore, to reduce the interdependency on the weather itself, a recommendation to develop a prototypic mobile robot for smart irrigation is submitted. Smart irrigation system is an essential tool from yield point of view and scarcity of the water. This smart irrigation system adopts a soil moisture sensor to measure the moisture content of the soil and automatically provide a signal to

Chitosan is one of the most widespread biopolymer materials available in nature which is extracted from chitin. The main source of chitosan is the chitin that is extracted from exoskeletons of crustacean, such as shrimp and crabs, which are found in a huge amount of shells waste that produced from seafood companies around the world. The chitosan has several applications such as pharmaceutical, fertilizer and edible coating in food industries. The quality of the chitosan's depends on its extraction method, so in this research work we have studied the effect of grounding shrimp shell waste

Thermal insulators have a crucial role in reducing the operational building energy. They are commonly fabricated from petrochemical materials that mostly cause negative environmental impacts. This study aims to develop banana leaves-polystyrene composites (BL-PS) as a sustainable and low-cost thermal insulator. The BL powder was mixed with PS in different weight ratios (90:10, 80:20, 70:30, and 60:40). Thermal conductivity, electrical conductivity, SEM, XRD, FTIR, TGA, and DSC were carried out on BL and BL-PS composites that were prepared with 10 wt.% of PS powder (BL-PS1) and 30 wt.% of PS

This paper reports on the variations in the parameters of the single dispersion Cole bio-impedance model of Daucus Carota Sativus (carrots) under heating and freezing conditions. Experiments are conducted on six samples with recorded live bio-impedance spectra versus temperature. The Cole model parameters are extracted from the measured data using the Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA) optimization technique and their variations are correlated with well-known bio-chemical and bio-mechanical variations. This represents a non-invasive method for characterizing and measuring the degree of change

This paper demonstrates the possibility of extracting the single-dispersion and double-dispersion Cole-bio-impedance model parameters using oscillators (sinusoidal or relaxation). The method is based on replacing selected components in the oscillator structure with the biological sample under test and then using the Flower Pollination optimization Algorithm (FPA) to solve a set of nonlinear equations in order to extract the unknown model parameters. Minimum component sinusoidal oscillators and relaxation oscillators are used in this work and experimental results on three samples of four

Bio-impedance circuit modeling is a popular and effective non-invasive technique used in medicine and biology to fit the measured spectral impedance data of living or non-living tissues. The variations in impedance magnitude and/or phase at different frequencies reflect implicit biophysical and biochemical changes. Bio-impedance is also used for sensing environmental changes and its use in the agriculture industry is rapidly increasing. In this paper, we review and compare among the fractional-order circuit models that best fit bio-impedance data and the different methods for identifying the

Nano particles contribute as a partial substitute in the production of eco-friendly building materials. This research presents a quantitative assessment of the sustainability effect of partially replacing cement in the green concrete mix with two types of nano-waste particles. The assessment is achieved using two weighing criteria developed by a Sustainable Decision Support System (SDSS) model. This assesses the alternatives using scoring systems based on both the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique and Multi-Criteria decision analysis method. Ten sustainable aspects comprising four

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

We consider a secondary user with energy harvesting capability. We design access schemes for the secondary user which incorporate random spectrum sensing and random access, and which make use of the primary automatic repeat request (ARQ) feedback. The sensing and access probabilities are obtained such that the secondary throughput is maximized under the constraints that both the primary and secondary queues are stable and that the primary queueing delay is kept lower than a specified value needed to guarantee a certain quality of service (QoS) for the primary user. We consider spectrum sensing

We consider a cognitive radio scenario with an energy harvesting secondary user (SU) attempting to access a primary channel randomly. We assume multipacket reception (MPR) capability and investigate a system in which the SU may or may not exploit the primary feedback messages. The access probabilities are obtained to maximize the secondary throughput under the constraints of primary queue stability and such that the primary queueing delay is kept below a specified value in order to guarantee a certain quality of service (QoS) for the primary user (PU). We investigate the impact of the energy