Products’ quality inspection is an important stage in every production route, in which the quality of the produced goods is estimated and compared with the desired specifications. With traditional inspection, the process rely on manual methods that generates various costs and large time consumption. On the contrary, today’s inspection systems that use modern techniques like computer vision, are more accurate and efficient. However, the amount of work needed to build a computer vision system based on classic techniques is relatively large, due to the issue of manually selecting and extracting features from digital images, which also produces labor costs for the system engineers.

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Objectives: Bromelain is a potent proteolytic enzyme that has a unique functionality makes it valuable for various therapeutic purposes. This study aimed to develop three novel formulations based on bromelain to be used as chemomechanical caries removal agents. Methods: The novel agents were prepared using different concentrations of bromelain (10–40 wt. %), with and without 0.1–0.3 wt. % chloramine T or 0.5–1.5 wt. % chlorhexidine (CHX). Based on the enzymatic activity test, three formulations were selected; 30 % bromelain (F1), 30 % bromelain-0.1 % chloramine (F2) and 30 % bromelain-1.5 % CHX (F3). The assessments included molecular docking, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), viscosity and pH measurements. The efficie

Electromyogram (EMG)-based Pattern Recognition (PR) systems for upper-limb prosthesis control provide promising ways to enable an intuitive control of the prostheses with multiple degrees of freedom and fast reaction times. However, the lack of robustness of the PR systems may limit their usability. In this paper, a novel adaptive time windowing framework is proposed to enhance the performance of the PR systems by focusing on their windowing and classification steps. The proposed framework estimates the output probabilities of each class and outputs a movement only if a decision with a probability above a certain threshold is achieved. Otherwise (i.e., all probability values are below the threshold), the window size of the EMG signa

Early detection of brain tumors is critical for enhancing treatment options and extending patient survival. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning gives more detailed information, such as greater contrast and clarity than any other scanning method. Manually dividing brain tumors from many MRI images collected in clinical practice for cancer diagnosis is a tough and time-consuming task. Tumors and MRI scans of the brain can be discovered using algorithms and machine learning technologies, making the process easier for doctors because MRI images can appear healthy when the person may have a tumor or be malignant. Recently, deep learning techniques based on deep convolutional neural networks have been used to analyze med

Incorporating waste byproducts into concrete is an innovative and promising way to minimize the environmental impact of waste material while maintaining and/or improving concrete’s mechanical characteristics and strength. The proper application of sawdust as a pozzolan in the building industry remains a significant challenge. Consequently, this study conducted an experimental evaluation of sawdust as a fill material. In particular, sawdust as a fine aggregate in concrete offers a realistic structural and economical possibility for the construction of lightweight structural systems. Failure under four-point loads was investigated for six concrete-filled steel tube (CFST) specimens. The results indicated that recycled lightweight co

The  thermal  and  electrical  performance  of  different  designs  of  air  based  hybrid photovoltaic/thermal collectors is investigated experimentally and theoretically. The circulating air is used to cool PV panels and to collect the absorbed energy to improve their performance. Four different collectors have been designed, manufactured and instrumented namely; double PV panels without cooling (model I), single duct double pass collector (model II), double duct single pass (model III), and single duct single pass (model IV) . Each collector consists of: channel duct, glass cover, axial fan to circulate air and two PV panel in parallel connection. The temperature of the upper and

This article presents a new cascaded extended state observer (CESO)-based sliding-mode control (SMC) for an underactuated flexible joint robot (FJR). The control of the FJR has many challenges, including coupling, underactuation, nonlinearity, uncertainties and external disturbances, and the noise amplification especially in the high-order systems. The proposed control integrates the CESO and SMC, in which the CESO estimates the states and disturbances, and the SMC provides the system robustness to the uncertainty and disturbance estimation errors. First, a dynamic model of the FJR is derived and converted from an underactuated form to a canonical form via the Olfati transformation and a flatness approach, which reduces the complexity of th

The  thermal  and  electrical  performance  of  different  designs  of  air  based  hybrid photovoltaic/thermal collectors is investigated experimentally and theoretically. The circulating air is used to cool PV panels and to collect the absorbed energy to improve their performance. Four different collectors have been designed, manufactured and instrumented namely; double PV panels without cooling (model I), single duct double pass collector (model II), double duct single pass (model III), and single duct single pass (model IV) . Each collector consists of: channel duct, glass cover, axial fan to circulate air and two PV panel in parallel connection. The temperature of the upper and lower surfaces of PV panels, air temper

Darcy-Weisbach (D-W) is a typical resistance equation in pressured flow; however, some academics and engineers prefer Hazen-Williams (H-W) for assessing water distribution networks. The main difference is that the (D-W) friction factor changes with the Reynolds number, while the (H-W) coefficient is a constant value for a certain material. This study uses WaterGEMS CONNECT Edition update 1 to find an empirical relation between the (H-W) and (H-W) equations for two 400 mm and 500 mm pipe systems. The hydraulic model was done, and two scenarios were applied by changing the (H-W) coefficient to show the difference in results of head loss. The results showed a strong relationship between both equations with correlation coefficients of 0.999,

An experimental study was performed to estimate the forced convection heat transfer performance and the pressure drop of a single layer graphene (GNPs) based DI-water nanofluid in a circular tube under a laminar flow and a uniform heat flux boundary conditions. The viscosity and thermal conductivity of nanofluid at weight concentrations of (0.1 to 1 wt%) were measured. The effects of the velocity of flow, heat flux and nanoparticle weight concentrations on the  enhancement of the heat transfer are examined. The Nusselt number of the GNPs nanofluid was enhanced as the heat flux and the velocity of flow rate  increased, and the maximum Nusselt number  ratio (Nu nanofluid/ Nu base fluid)   and thermal performance factor