Objectives This work presents laser coating of grade 1 pure titanium (Ti) dental implant surface with sintered biological apatite beta-tricalcium phosphate (β-TCP), which has a chemical composition close to bone. Materials and methods Pulsed Nd:YAG laser of single pulse capability up to 70 J/10 ms and pulse peak power of 8 kW was used to implement the task. Laser pulse peak power, pulse duration, repetition rate and scanning speed were modulated to achieve the most homogenous, cohesive and highly adherent coat layer. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray microscopy (EDX), optical microscopy and nanoindentation analyses were conducted to characterise and evaluate the microstructure, phases, modulus of elasticity of the coating layer and calcium-to-phosphate ratio and composition. Results showed that the laser power and scanning speed influenced coating adherence. The cross-sectional field-emission scanning electron microscopy images at low power and high speed showed poor adherence and improved as the laser power increased to 2 kW. Decreasing the scanning speed to 0.2 mm/s at the same power of 2 kW increased adherence. EDX results of the substrate demonstrated that the chemical composition of the coat layer did not change after processing. Moreover, the maps revealed proper distribution of Ca and P with some agglomeration on the surface. The sharp peaks on the X-ray diffraction patterns indicated that β-TCPs in the coat layer were mostly crystalline. The elastic modulus was low at the surface and increased gradually with depth to reach 19 GPa at 200 nm; this value was close to that of bone. The microhardness of the coated substrate increased by about 88%. The laser pulse energy of 8.3 J, pulse peak power of 2 kW, pulse duration of 4.3 min, repetition rate of 10 Hz and scanning speed of 0.2 ms−1 yielded the best results. Conclusion: Both processing and coating have potential use for dental implant applications.
Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has become one of the most common chronic liver diseases worldwide, which characterized by steatosis, inflammation, and fibrosis. The aim of this designed study is to evaluate the ability of guggulsterone to prevent high fat diet induced steatohepatitis in mice. Five groups of male mice were selected and treated as the following: group I, mice had free access to standard commercial diet and considered as control group, group II, mice were fed a specially formulated high-fat diet for 12 weeks to induce non-alcoholic liver disease, while groups III, IV and V the mice were administered high fat diet containing guggulsterone at 500, 1000 and 2000 ppm concentration respectively for 12 weeks. Maintaini
... Show MoreThis research aims to distinguish the reef environment from the non-reef environment. The Oligocene-Miocene-succussion in western Iraq was selected as a case study, represented by the reefal limestone facies of the Anah Formation (Late Oligocene) deposited in reef-back reef environments, dolomitic limestone of the Euphrates Formation (Early Miocene) deposited in open sea environments, and gypsiferous marly limestone of the Fatha Formation (Middle Miocene) deposited in a lagoonal environment. The content of the rare earth elements (REEs) (La, Ce, Pr, Nd, Sm, Eu, Gd, Tb, Dy, Er, Ho, Tm, Yb, Lu, and Y) in reef facies appear to be much lower than of those in the non-reef facies. The open sea facies have a low content of REEs due to bein
... Show More<span>Digital audio is required to transmit large sizes of audio information through the most common communication systems; in turn this leads to more challenges in both storage and archieving. In this paper, an efficient audio compressive scheme is proposed, it depends on combined transform coding scheme; it is consist of i) bi-orthogonal (tab 9/7) wavelet transform to decompose the audio signal into low & multi high sub-bands, ii) then the produced sub-bands passed through DCT to de-correlate the signal, iii) the product of the combined transform stage is passed through progressive hierarchical quantization, then traditional run-length encoding (RLE), iv) and finally LZW coding to generate the output mate bitstream.
... Show MoreRecently, the development and application of the hydrological models based on Geographical Information System (GIS) has increased around the world. One of the most important applications of GIS is mapping the Curve Number (CN) of a catchment. In this research, three softwares, such as an ArcView GIS 9.3 with ArcInfo, Arc Hydro Tool and Geospatial Hydrologic Modeling Extension (Hec-GeoHMS) model for ArcView GIS 9.3, were used to calculate CN of (19210 ha) Salt Creek watershed (SC) which is located in Osage County, Oklahoma, USA. Multi layers were combined and examined using the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) ArcMap 2009. These layers are soil layer (Soil Survey Geographic SSURGO), 30 m x 30 m resolution of Digital Elevati
... Show MoreThis work deals with the separation of benzene and toluene from a BTX fraction. The separation was carried out using adsorption by molecular sieve zeolite 13X in a fixed bed. The concentration of benzene and toluene in the influent streams was measured using gas chromatography. The effect of flow rate in the range 0.77 – 2.0 cm3/min on the benzene and toluene extraction from BTX fraction was studied. The flow rate increasing decreases the breakthrough and saturation times. The effect of bed height in the range 31.6 – 63.3 cm on benzene and toluene adsorption from BTX fraction was studied. The increase of bed height increasing increases the break point values. The effect of the concentration of benzene in the range 0.0559 – 0.2625g/
... Show MoreThe goal of this research is to develop a numerical model that can be used to simulate the sedimentation process under two scenarios: first, the flocculation unit is on duty, and second, the flocculation unit is out of commission. The general equation of flow and sediment transport were solved using the finite difference method, then coded using Matlab software. The result of this study was: the difference in removal efficiency between the coded model and operational model for each particle size dataset was very close, with a difference value of +3.01%, indicating that the model can be used to predict the removal efficiency of a rectangular sedimentation basin. The study also revealed
To maintain the security and integrity of data, with the growth of the Internet and the increasing prevalence of transmission channels, it is necessary to strengthen security and develop several algorithms. The substitution scheme is the Playfair cipher. The traditional Playfair scheme uses a small 5*5 matrix containing only uppercase letters, making it vulnerable to hackers and cryptanalysis. In this study, a new encryption and decryption approach is proposed to enhance the resistance of the Playfair cipher. For this purpose, the development of symmetric cryptography based on shared secrets is desired. The proposed Playfair method uses a 5*5 keyword matrix for English and a 6*6 keyword matrix for Arabic to encrypt the alphabets of
... Show MoreIn this study, a fast block matching search algorithm based on blocks' descriptors and multilevel blocks filtering is introduced. The used descriptors are the mean and a set of centralized low order moments. Hierarchal filtering and MAE similarity measure were adopted to nominate the best similar blocks lay within the pool of neighbor blocks. As next step to blocks nomination the similarity of the mean and moments is used to classify the nominated blocks and put them in one of three sub-pools, each one represents certain nomination priority level (i.e., most, less & least level). The main reason of the introducing nomination and classification steps is a significant reduction in the number of matching instances of the pixels belong to the c
... Show More