Objective: The approximate life span of a silicone maxillofacial prosthesis is as short as1.5–2 years of clinical service, then a new prosthesis should be fabricated. The most common reasonfor re-making the prosthesis is silicone mechanical properties degradation. The aim of this studywas to assess some mechanical properties of VST-30 silicone for maxillofacial prostheses after addi-tion of intrinsic pigments.Methods: Two types of intrinsic pigments (rayon flocking and burnt sienna); each of them wasincorporated into silicone. One hundred and twenty samples were prepared and split into 4 groupsaccording to the conducted tests (tear strength, hardness, surface roughness, and tensile strengthand elongation percentage) with 30 samples for each test. Each group was equally split into threesubgroups. Group (A) was without pigment (control group), group (B) was with rayon flockingand group (C) was with burnt sienna.Results: Samples with rayon flocking showed a highly significant decrease in hardness and therewas a significant increase in tear strength, while there were non-significant differences in surfaceroughness, tensile strength and elongation percentage. Samples with burnt sienna showed a highlysignificant increase in tear strength and a highly significant decrease in hardness, but surface rough-ness, tensile strength and elongation percentage showed non-significant differences. However, therewere non-significant differences between experimental groups in all tests.
At atmospheric pressure and at a frequency of 9.1 kHz, a constructed magnetically stabilized tornado gliding arc discharge (MSGAD) system was utilized in this study to generate a non-thermal plasma with an alternating voltage source from 2,4,6,8 to 10 kV. Argon gas was used to generate the arc plasma with an adjustable flow rate using a flow meter regulator to stabilize the gas flow rate to 2 L/min. A gliding plasma discharge is achieved by a magnetic field for the purpose of a planned investigation. The influence of the magnetically stabilized tornado gliding arc discharge parameters such as magnetic field and applied voltage on microscopic tornado plasma parameters was studied. The electron temperature1was measured using a Boltzmann plot
... Show MoreBackground: The surface properties of the titanium alloy plays a significant role in the bond of the dental implant with living bone and modification of the implant surface could enhance osseointegration. This study was aimed to investigate the effect of different durations of heat treatment on the surface properties of titanium alloy for dental implants. Materials and methods: Twenty disks of (Ti-6Al-4V) alloy were prepared. The sample was divided into four test groups to study the effect of different duration of heat treatment to the surface topography; surface chemistry, titanium oxide layer thickness, blood contact angle, & blood drop diameter of titanium alloy samples were investigated to evaluate the effect of different durations of
... Show MoreDuring 9–10 September 2011 the ACE, Wind, and SOHO spacecraft measured the complex interaction between an interplanetary coronal mass ejection (ICME) and a corotating interaction region (CIR) associated with the heliospheric sector boundary. Except for a few short periods, the suprathermal electrons are unidirectional, suggesting that the ICME magnetic field has opened through interchange reconnection. Signatures of interaction are distributed throughout the event suggesting that the structures have become entangled or embedded. Since the ICME speed is relatively low, the strong forward shock must be caused by the ICME‐CIR interaction. Other interesting features are the upstream heating flux disc
In this work, we have investigated optical properties of the thermally evaporation PbS/CdS thin films. The optical constant such as (refractive index n, dielectric constant εi,r and Extinction coefficient κ) of the deposition films were obtained from the analysis of the experimental recorded transmittance spectral data. The optical band gap of PbS/CdS films is calculate from (αhυ)1/2 vs. photon energy curve.
Unsaturated soil can raise many geotechnical problems upon wetting and drying resulting in swelling upon wetting and collapsing (shrinkage) in drying and changing in the soil shear strength. The classical principles of saturated soil are often not suitable in explaining these phenomena. In this study, expansive soil (bentonite and sand) were tested in different water contents and dry unit weight chosen from the compaction curve to examine the effect of water content change on soil properties (swelling pressure, expansion index, shear strength (soil cohesion) and soil suction by the filter paper method). The physical properties of these soils were studied by conducting series of tests in laboratory. Fitting methods
... Show MoreBulk polycrystalline samples have been prepared by the two-step solid state reaction process. It has been observed that as grown Tl2-xHgxSr2Ca2Cu3O10+δ (with x = 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.8, 1) corresponds to the 2223 phase. It has been found that Tc varies with Hg content .The optimum Tc is about 120K for the composition Tl1.6Hg0.4Sr2Ca2Cu3O10+δ.The microstructure for Tl1.6Hg0.4Sr2Ca2Cu3O10+δ observed to be most dense and this phase exhibits the highest stability.
The current research aimed to investigate the psychometric characteristics of the Arabic version of the Nomophobia scale for the Omani youth. The scale was administered to a random sample of students from public and private universities and colleges in Oman. The research sample consisted of 2507 students, of whom 868 males and 1639 females. The validity of the measure was first checked by presenting the scale to a group of experts in this field. Then the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was carried out. The exploratory factor analysis revealed the existence of three main factors: the fear of connectivity loss, the fear of communication loss with others, and the fear of network outages. These factors accounted for 65.6% of the
... Show MoreSpatial data observed on a group of areal units is common in scientific applications. The usual hierarchical approach for modeling this kind of dataset is to introduce a spatial random effect with an autoregressive prior. However, the usual Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme for this hierarchical framework requires the spatial effects to be sampled from their full conditional posteriors one-by-one resulting in poor mixing. More importantly, it makes the model computationally inefficient for datasets with large number of units. In this article, we propose a Bayesian approach that uses the spectral structure of the adjacency to construct a low-rank expansion for modeling spatial dependence. We propose a pair of computationally efficient estimati
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