Background:The demand for esthetic orthodontic appliances is increasing so that the esthetic orthodontic archwires were introduced. This in vitro study was designed to evaluate the surface roughness offiber-reinforced polymer composite (FRPC) archwires compared to coated nickel-titanium (NiTi) archwires immersed in artificial saliva. Materials and Methods:Three types of esthetic orthodontic archwires were used: FRPC (Dentaurum), Teflon coated NiTi (Dentaurum) and epoxy coated NiTi (Orthotechnology). They were round (0.018 inch) in cross section and cut into pieces of 15 mm in length.Forty pieces from each type were divided into four groups; one group was left at a dry condition and the other three groups were immersed in artificial saliva (pH=6.75 ± 0.015) at 37ºC for 1, 14 and 28 days intervals. The AFM was used to evaluatesurface analysis of all samples.ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis, LSD and Mann-Whitney U tests were used to identify and localize the source of differences among the groups. Results:At each immersion period, FRPC wires exhibited the highest Ra among the study groups, except at 28 days immersion period where the Teflon coatings were the roughest. On the other hand, the least rough surfaces were the epoxy coatings when compared to analogous esthetic archwires, except at 1 day immersion period where the Teflon coatings had the least roughness. However, statistically non-significant differences were found between Teflon and epoxy at the dry condition and the 1 day immersion. Conclusions:The epoxy coated archwires are the best and the most appropriate esthetic orthodontic alignment archwires in term of the least surface roughness initially and over the course of study period.
This study aims to encapsulate atenolol within floating alginate-ethylcellulose beads as an oral controlled-release delivery system using aqueous colloidal polymer dispersion (ACPD) method.To optimize drug entrapment efficiency and dissolution behavior of the prepared beads, different parameters of drug: polymer ratio, polymer mixture ratio, and gelling agent concentration were involved.The prepared beads were investigated with respect to their buoyancy, encapsulation efficiency, and dissolution behavior in the media: 0.1 N HCl (pH 1.2), acetate buffer (pH 4.6) and phosphate buffer (pH 6.8). The release kinetics and mechanism of the drug from the prepared beads was investigated.All prepare
... Show MoreClinical keratoconus (KCN) detection is a challenging and time-consuming task. In the diagnosis process, ophthalmologists must revise demographic and clinical ophthalmic examinations. The latter include slit-lamb, corneal topographic maps, and Pentacam indices (PI). We propose an Ensemble of Deep Transfer Learning (EDTL) based on corneal topographic maps. We consider four pretrained networks, SqueezeNet (SqN), AlexNet (AN), ShuffleNet (SfN), and MobileNet-v2 (MN), and fine-tune them on a dataset of KCN and normal cases, each including four topographic maps. We also consider a PI classifier. Then, our EDTL method combines the output probabilities of each of the five classifiers to obtain a decision b
The aim of this paper is to present a method for solving high order ordinary differential equations with two point's boundary condition, we propose semi-analytic technique using two-point oscillatory interpolation to construct polynomial solution. The original problem is concerned using two-point oscillatory interpolation with the fit equal numbers of derivatives at the end points of an interval [0 , 1] . Also, many examples are presented to demonstrate the applicability, accuracy and efficiency of the method by comparing with conventional methods.
In this research, the program SEEP / W was used to compute the value of seepage through the homogenous and non-homogeneous earth dam with known dimensions. The results show that the relationship between the seepage and water height in upstream of the dam to its length for saturated soil was nonlinear when the dam is homogenous. For the non-homogeneous dam, the relationship was linear and the amount of seepage increase with the height of water in upstream to its length. Also the quantity of seepage was calculated using the method of (Fredlund and Xing, 1994) and (Van Genuchten, 1980) when the soil is saturated – unsaturated, the results referred to that the higher value of seepage when the soil is saturated and the lowe
... Show MoreIn this paper, the Active Suspension System (ASS) of road vehicles was investigated. In addition to the conventional stiffness and damper, the proposed ASS includes a fuzzy controller, a hydraulic actuator, and an LVDT position sensor. Furthermore, this paper presents a nonlinear model describing the operation of the hydraulic actuator as a part of the suspension system. Additionally, the detailed steps of the fuzzy controller design for such a system are introduced. A MATLAB/Simulink model was constructed to study the proposed ASS at different profiles of road irregularities. The results have shown that the proposed ASS has superior performance compared to the conventional Passive Suspension System (PSS), where the body displacemen
... Show MoreA group of derivatives for compounds 2-Amino-3-carboxy-4,5,6,7-tetra hydrobenz -othiophene bearing different heterocyclic moieties such as Schiff bases. B-Lactum, 4-thiazolidinone.1,3-oxazepan. The newly synthesized derivatives have been supported by spectral data FT-IR, H1-NMR. All the synthesized compounds were screened for their antimicrobial activities against gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria as reference.
Alumina thin films have significant applications in the areas of optoelectronics, optics, electrical insulators, sensors and tribology. The novel aspect of this work is that the homogeneous alumina thin films were prepared in several stages to generate a plasma jet. In this paper, aluminium nanoparticles suspended in vinyl alcohol were prepared using exploding wire plasma. TEM analysis was used to determine the size and shape of particles in aluminium and vinyl alcohol suspensions; the TEM images showed that the particle size is 17.2 nm. Aluminium/poly vinyl alcohol (Al/PVA) thin films were prepared using this suspension on quartz substrate by plasma jet technique at room temperature with an argon gas flow rate of 1 L/min. The Al/PV
... Show MoreTo assess the total hip replacement patients’ knowledge of home – care regarding pain management, medication therapy, wound care, mobility limitation and complications may occur in the post hip replacement surgery, and to assess relationship between some variables such as, age level of education, sex & marital status with home- care knowledge. A descriptive study was used to assess the hip-replacement patient home-knowledge, a purposive sampling of (60) hip-replaced –patients were selected from Gazy Alhariri Hospital (central of surgical profession ) and Alwasity Hospital ( plastic surgery) , the questionnaire obtains two parts , part one, which included socio-demographical characteristics of the samp
... Show MoreThe nuclear ground-state structure of some Nickel (58-66Ni) isotopes has been investigated within the framework of the mean field approach using the self-consist Hartree-Fock calculations (HF) including the effective interactions of Skyrme. The Skyrme parameterizations SKM, SKM*, SI, SIII, SKO, SKE, SLY4, SKxs15, SKxs20 and SKxs25 have been utilized with HF method to study the nuclear ground state charge, mass, neutron and proton densities with the corresponding root mean square radii, charge form factors, binding energies and neutron skin thickness. The deduced results led to specifying one set or more of Skyrme parameterizations that used to achieve the best agreement with the available experimental
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