Maruf Mortula

American University of Sharjah | AUS · Department of Civil Engineering

Recycling treated greywater (GW) for onsite, non-potable applications can reduce the potable water demand typically used for non-potable purposes. The conventional methods for GW treatment are limited in their ability to remove wide-ranging pollutants that are inexpensive and use low energy. For this reason, effective and low-cost onsite treatment...

Pipe leakage in water distribution networks (WDNs) has been an emerging concern for water utilities worldwide due to its public health and economic significance. Not only does it cause significant water losses, but it also deteriorates the quality of the treated water in WDNs. Hence, a prompt response is required to avoid or minimize the eventual c...

The commonly used household plumbing pipes are made of Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) pipes. However, there are concerns regarding their role as source of microplastics (MPs) in the water supply system. This study aimed to investigate the leachability of MPs from PVC pipes under stagnant conditions. Laboratory experiments were conducted in PVC pipes to s...

Over recent years, the sustainability and resilience concept has increased its significance in the construction industry. Sustainability is associated with implementing best practices in the construction industry, while resilience is the adaptability and tolerance of systems in harsh conditions. The concepts are learned in the construction process....

6 (M.M.M.) 7 Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study that examines the effects of the Dubai Creek 11 extension on its hydrodynamics and water flushing dynamics. Dubai Creek (Khor Dubai) is a 24 12 km-long artificial seawater stream located in the emirate of Dubai. The creek has experienced the 13 impact of rapid urbanization of Dubai and...

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries experience a harsh environment with low precipitation and high evaporation rates. This presents a significant challenge of water scarcity and water quality degradation which is exacerbated by land use practices. Agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization are impacting the management of water resour...

The maintenance of transportation systems is vital for road safety and cost reduction. Condition assessment is one key aspect of this process. However, the use of computer vision and machine learning (ML) has the potential to streamline and improve this process. This study investigates the integration of geographic information systems (GIS), aerial...

While plastic mulch (PM) can increase crop yield and reduce weed growth, there are negative environmental impacts associated with the production, use, and disposal of PM films. There is currently a gap in the literature on the negative impacts of PM throughout its entire lifecycles, with most studies limited to investigating the global warming pote...

Construction is a demanding sector, requiring substantial energy and non-renewable resources. Also, it causes detrimental environmental impact. Amongst all the building materials, traditional fire-burnt clay bricks are used exclusively in many developing countries. Although, significant efforts are put into encouraging the use of alternative bricks...

Construction is a demanding sector, requiring substantial energy and non-renewable resources. Also, it causes detrimental environmental impact. Amongst all the building materials, traditional fire-burnt clay bricks are used exclusively in many developing countries. Although, significant efforts are put into encouraging the use of alternative bricks...

Leakages in the water distribution networks (WDNs) are real problems for utilities and other governmental agencies. Timely leak detection and location identification have been challenges. In this paper, an integrated approach to geospatial and infrared image processing was used for robust leak detection. The method combines drops in flow, pressure,...

Water is one of the most important and scarce resources needed to sustain life. Wasting this invaluable resource will have negative impacts on humans and the environment. Producing potable water requires significant energy and hence a huge budget, therefore water leakage from distribution networks could lead to financial instability. To prevent thi...

The role of the water distribution system (WDS) requires that it supply water of sufficient quality to households. Unregulated leaching of micro and nanoplastics from plastic pipes of the distribution system is therefore a cause for concern, particularly with the rise in research associating these plastic particles to adverse health impacts in livi...

Leakages in the water distribution networks (WDNs) are real problems for utilities and other governmental agencies. Timely leak detection and location identification has been a challenge. In this paper, an integrated approach to geospatial and infrared image processing method was used for robust leak detection. The method combines drops in flow, pr...

Mangroves are imperative to coastal systems, providing security against extreme weather events by acting as natural barriers. These halophytic plants play a crucial role in mitigating global warming and act as an invaluable resource for consumption. Despite proving to be resilient, mangroves exhibit sensitivity to climatic (e.g., Land Surface Tempe...

Mangroves are vital part of coastal areas, providing security against extreme weather events by acting as a natural barrier. The intricate root system of man-groves aids in the inhibition of soil loss. It also absorbs nutrients from water, thereby acting as a vehicle for natural water treatment process. This scheme may potentially end up improving...

Leaks in water distribution networks produce significant economic losses. These leaks from underground pipelines affect the surrounding environment in different ways that can be detected using various technologies. This paper introduces an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) equipped with an infrared temperature sensor to remotely detect thermal anomalie...

The detection of leakages in Water Distribution Networks (WDNs) is usually challenging and identifying their locations may take a long time. Current water leak detection methods such as model-based and measurement-based approaches face significant limitations that impact response times, resource requirements, accuracy, and location identification....

The human nervous system is one of the most complex systems of the human body. Understanding its behavior is crucial in drug discovery and developing medical devices. One approach to understanding such a system is to model its most basic unit, neurons. The leaky integrate and fire (LIF) method models the neurons’ response to a stimulus. Given the f...

Few researchers have attempted to experimentally evaluate the low-strain shear wave velocity (Vs) of specimens undergoing large strain deformations. They report that the Vs is practically unaffected by the strains, and the reasons behind this behavior are not fully understood. This study presents the continuous measurement of low-strain Vs with ben...

Polymeric pipes have become the most dominant type of pipes used in water distribution systems (WDS). There were not enough studies conducted on the impact of desalination on the WDS. The effect of polymeric pipes on the quality of desalinated water is rarely explored. This research aimed at studying formation of trihalomethanes (THMs) for desalina...

Diabetes is sweeping the world as a silent epidemic, posing a growing threat to public health. Modeling diabetes is an effective method to monitor the increasing prevalence of diabetes and develop cost-effective strategies that control the incidence of diabetes and its complications. This paper focuses on a mathematical model known as the diabetes...

Emerging pollutants (EPs) are the contaminants of concern in water systems. These are mainly due to anthropogenic activities and are not always removed during water treatment, eventually affecting the quality of water supply systems (WSSs). These pollutants vary from organic pollutants such as pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and flame retardants to in...

Water distribution system is a key infrastructure providing good quality water resources to the individual consumers. However, water interacts with the plastic materials within the water distribution system. It can eventually leach the microplastics and nanoplastic particles− pollutants that have been linked to potential chronic health problems in...

Ultrasound images are affected by speckle noise which degrades their quality. This paper presents an adaptive filtering approach of ultrasound speckle based on the analysis of the temporal evolution of the deposition of sediments in a plastic water pipe. The filtering technique is based on temporal change analysis. Unchanged pixels are averaged to...

In this study, speckle noise removal on Mangrove forests of United Arab Emirates from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is studied. Several state of the art filters such as Boxcar, Lee sigma, non-local means (NLM) and improved iterative minimum mean square error (IMMSE) are implemented. The results show that improved IMMSE filter performs bette...

Mangroves are an essential component of coastal ecosystems, and they demonstrate resilience against climatic and anthropogenic factors. They provide blue carbon stock and security against coastal erosion and provide raw materials for human consumption. However, mangroves continue to perish due to climate factors and land-use/land-cover (LULC) chang...

Condition assessment as part of infrastructure evaluation is a critical process that should be conducted regularly to manage the operations and maintenance in a sustainable way. However, it can be observed that condition assessment is often overlooked by some professionals in the construction industry. It leads to unwarranted wastage of resources....

Speckle filtering is essential for accurate parameter estimation from polarimetric synthetic aperture (PolSAR) data. To reduce speckle, sufficiently large independent samples (i. e. N looks) are generally averaged. However, in real scene, these N-looks are not provided. To surmount this limitation, by exploiting the ergodicity of the SAR data, the...

An environmental sustainability assessment of a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) operation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is presented in this study. Various emissions from the wastewater treatment facility, as well as their environmental parameters, are assessed using OpenLCA, a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software. The functional unit is 1 m3...

In this paper, an extensive research on grayscale images applying spatial domain filtering technique to remove additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) has been developed. However, the existing average based filters have a main limitation which is the exploitation of the statistics of the original noisy image only. Nevertheless, in the infinite number...

Wastewater reuse is essential for sustainable water management. However, it requires tertiary treatment within the plant to ensure suitable water quality. This project aims to investigate the comparative performance of conventional tertiary treatment (sand filtration) against membrane filtration technology to demonstrate the viability of membrane t...

Leakages from water distribution infrastructures are responsible for a considerable amount of water losses. Consequently, innovative, non-destructive techniques (NDT) of leakage detection for early recognition is vital. In this study, the leak detection abilities of Ground Penetration Radar (GPR), spectrometers, and infrared (IR) cameras were inves...

The use of plastics in massive quantities has led to its accumulation on land and in turn to its transport to water. This accumulation have been attributed to the plastics non-biodegradable nature and poor waste management practices. When in water, plastics are disintegrated into smaller pieces known as microplastics and are transported by wind and...

Mathematical modeling has been used to simulate the interaction of chemotherapy and immunotherapy drugs intervention with the dynamics of tumor cells growth. This work studies the interaction of cells in the immune system, such as the natural killer, dendritic, and cytotoxic CD8+ T cells, with chemotherapy. Four different cases were considered in t...

Introduction A significant increase in outbreaks has been recorded in the past due to chemical and biological hazards in water distribution networks (WDNs). Disinfection is considered a crucial step in maintaining the microbial safety of water systems; however, often at the cost of generating harmful by-products. The drinking water safety measure i...

Communities around the world are looking for ways to provide reliable and cost-effective infrastructure services to end-users. Sustainable and resilient infrastructures are the demands of the day. Both public and private sectors demand resilient and sustainable infrastructure to satisfy the rising consumer demands and foster economic development. W...

The use of plastic has become common. Large amounts of plastic waste are disposed in landfill without the ability to biodegrade. These plastic materials often disintegrate into microplastic that end up in the leachate, a wastewater stream containing harmful contaminants extracted from the waste plastic. These particles can eventually contaminate th...

Water leakage detection and localization in distribution networks pipelines is a challenge for utility companies. For this purpose, thermal Infrared Radiation (IR) techniques have been widely applied in the literature. However, the classical analysis of IR images has not been robust in detecting and locating leakage, due to presence of thermal anom...

Speckle filtering in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) images is indispensable before the extraction of the useful information. The minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimate of the filtered pixels conducted to the definition of a linear rule between the values of the filtered pixels and their variances. Hence, the filtere...

The outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States has resulted in over 11.2 million cases and over 240 thousand deaths. COVID-19 has affected the society in unprecedented way with its socioeconomic impact yet to be determined. This study aimed at assessing the vulnerability of the US at the county-level to COVID-19 using the pandemic data from January...

This paper presents the results of experimental study conducted to investigate the effects of different parameters on bromate formation in bottles of drinking water. The effects of various temperatures, storage times, pH and some water quality parameters including bromide, Total Organic Carbon (TOC) and Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) were investigate...

The span is widely employed in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) polarimetry (PolSAR) applications. The span is a summation of the three polarimetric intensity channels, its probability density function (pdf) is commonly assumed in the literature as that of the intensity polarimetric channel. In this letter, the statistics of the span are investigated...

Daily human activities and vast green areas produce substantial amounts of organic wastes that end up in landfills with minimal treatment. In addition to the problems associated with landfills, disposal through this method is unsustainable in the long run and does not allow recovering materials from the waste. This paper focuses on the co-compostin...

The change in the temperature of an underground water pipeline and its surrounding environment caused by a leakage has been detected by a variety of devices. Among the most popular technologies are infrared cameras, distributed temperature sensing using fiber optic cables, and analog active temperature sensors. In this paper, a novel low-cost leaka...

Speckle reduction in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and SAR polarimetry (PolSAR) is important for the extraction of important information for homogeneous extended areas. Finding good balance between spatial detail preservation and high equivalent number of looks is a challenge. In this paper, we validate the use of the infinite number of loo...

Ultrasound imaging finds many applications in water environments. The water leakage milieu is considered in this study. However, the ultrasound images are contaminated by speckle noise which damages its quality. It complicates diagnosis and quantitative and visual measurements. In this work, the iterative minimum mean square error (IMMSE) method ha...

The last few decades have witnessed a tremendous increase in nutrient levels (phosphorus and nitrogen) in coastal water leading to excessive algal growth (Eutrophication). The presence of large amounts of algae turns the water’s color into green or red, in the case of algal blooms. Chlorophyll-a is often used as an indicator of algal biomass. Due t...

Speckle filtering in synthetic aperture radar polarimetry (PolSAR) is essential for the extraction of significant information. In this study, the authors introduced a hybrid iterative filtering scheme. The proposed iterative filter is initialized by a polarimetric filter ensuring a high speckle reduction level. Then, to enhance the spatial details,...

The use of plastic encompassed all aspects of our life. Moreover, the production and consumption of plastic products are continuously increasing. While disposed, these large amount of waste don’t biodegrade and a leachate (wastewater stream), containing different contaminants of plastic is generally formed in the bottom of the landfill sites. Leach...

Water supply system is a key infrastructure providing critical services to city dwellers. Due to major disaster events causing water shortage, the supply systems can be vulnerable. This paper presents a study aimed at evaluating vulnerability in a water supply system and finding ways to improve its resiliency. The water supply system in the city of...

Polymeric pipes have now become a favourite choice for water distribution networks. However, the role of polymeric pipes with respect to quality of water distributed has not been extensively studied. These studies are critical for desalinated water distribution as the water can be aggressive to its surroundings. The objective of this study was to i...

Secondary wastewater treatment plants often release some organic material, phosphorus and turbidity. These residual pollutants are capable of causing problems even at a low level. Therefore, tertiary treatment of secondary effluent was used as the main objective of this study. Laboratory based experiments were conducted to achieve the objectives. T...

The recent advancement in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology has enabled high-resolution imaging capability which calls for efficient speckle filtering algorithms to pre-process radar imagery. Since the introduction of Lee sigma filter in 1980, the various versions of the minimum mean square error (MMSE) filter were developed, focusing essen...

Predicting the stage-discharge relationship in two-stage channels is a significant factor, as it determines the discharge and the degree of flood accurately. There are conventional methods, in which they either do not meet the required accuracy or simplicity. In this paper, a new simple model is developed for symmetric compound channels to predict...

Water leaks in the distribution network produce significant losses and cause serious economic inconvenience especially in areas with water shortage. In this paper, the operational aspects of the most popular offline detection technologies, ground penetrating radars (GPR’s), infrared (IR) cameras, and acoustic detectors, were compared. The authors a...

Microplastic contamination in beach sediments along the coast of Dubai is un-documented. In this study, microplastic contamination in beach sediments collected from the wrack lines of 16 beaches in Dubai was evaluated. Five samples were collected from each beach along a 100 m stretch using a 0.5 m by 0.5 m, quadrant. The number, color, and shape of...

Rapid economic growth stressed the existing water resources, requiring alternative sources of water supply. Wastewater reuse is viewed as a viable alternative. However, due to lack of suitable technologies, wastewater reuse is not always widely adopted. Filtration technologies are considered viable approach for advanced treatment of secondary efflu...

Maintaining a healthy water distribution network (WDN) is key to providing good quality services to the consumers in a sustainable manner. WDN in the City of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (UAE), has more than 3,000 km of pipeline and receives water from different sources. Understanding the variation of water quality over time is critical to appropr...

The requirements of the drinking water quality are constantly changing with growing knowledge of pollutants. Even if the water was abundant, it still needs to meet specific quality requirements in order for it to be used. Hence, it is important to study water quality characteristics, and the factors affecting them. Water contamination can come from...

Maintaining water quality in distribution systems is crucial for ensuring safety of water supply. The distribution infrastructure is typically buried underground and it is often difficult to assess the condition of the system. In case of breakage of underground pipe network, external agents, like microorganisms may ingress into the distribution sys...

Water leakage is an important issue that needs to be addressed and investigated as it affects the efficiency of the distribution system. This paper discusses the use of the spectrometer to detect pipeleaks. The objective was achieved through use of pilot scale experiments. The experimental setup consists of a wooden box filled with dune sand. It in...

Water is scarce and needs to be conserved. A considerable amount of water which flows in the water distribution systems was found to be lost due to pipe leaks. Consequently, innovations in methods of pipe leakage detections for early recognition and repair of these leaks is vital to ensure minimum wastage of water in distribution systems. A major c...

Water is scarce and needs to be conserved. A considerable amount of water which flows in the water distribution systems was found to be lost due to pipe leaks. Consequently, innovations in methods of pipe leakage detections for early recognition and repair of these leaks is vital to ensure minimum wastage of water in distribution systems. A major c...

Dubai has been an example of rapid development in recent years, adversely affecting water quality in the surrounding areas. One such effect is the reoccurring algal bloom (high chlorophyll-a concentration) in Dubai Creek, a coastal lake in Dubai. The objectives of this study were to retrieve chlorophyll-a from Dubai Sat-1 imagery and to further inv...

This paper presents the results of a hydrodynamic model coupled with water quality model for the Dubai Creek. The main purpose of this study was to understand the processes affecting water quality parameters in the creek. In order to evaluate the amount, source and distribution of algae, dissolved oxygen (DO), nitrate (NO3-) and phosphate (PO43-) i...