Background: The bond strength of root canal sealers to dentin and gutta-percha seems to be an important property for maintaining the stability of root canal filling, which potentially influences both leakage and root strength. The objective of this, in vitro, study was to evaluate the shear bond strength of three different endodontic sealers (Gutta-Flow, AH Plus, Apexit Plus) to dentin, in the presence and absence of the smear layer and gutta percha. Material and Methods: After slicing off the occlusal 2mm of 60 extracted human maxillary premolar teeth, the exposed dentin served as the tested surfaces; the teeth were fixed with cold cure acrylic, and were divided into two groups according to the smear layer presence, group A without smear

Virtual reality, VR, offers many benefits to technical education, including the delivery of information through multiple active channels, the addressing of different learning styles, and experiential-based learning. This paper presents work performed by the authors to apply VR to engineering education, in three broad project areas: virtual robotic learning, virtual mechatronics laboratory, and a virtual manufacturing platform. The first area provides guided exploration of domains otherwise inaccessible, such as the robotic cell components, robotic kinematics and work envelope.  The second promotes mechatronics learning and guidance for new mechatronics engineers when dealing with robots in a safe and interactive manner. And the thir

In this paper, thermal performance of a zig-zig solar air heater (ZZSAH) with and without using steel wire mesh on the absorber plate of the collector is experimentally investigated. The experimental work includes four inclination angles of the collector 20^o, 30^o, 45^o, and 60^o and four air mass flow rates of 0.03, 0.04, 0.06, and 0.08 kg/s under varieties of operating conditions of a geographic location of  Baghdad. New correlation equations of Nusselt number are obtained from experimental results for both types of collectors where the effect of varying of the inclination angle of collector taken into consideration in the experiment. The correlations show good agreement wi

Abstract 

This paper presents an intelligent model reference adaptive control (MRAC) utilizing a self-recurrent wavelet neural network (SRWNN) to control nonlinear systems. The proposed SRWNN is an improved version of a previously reported wavelet neural network (WNN). In particular, this improvement was achieved by adopting two modifications to the original WNN structure. These modifications include, firstly, the utilization of a specific initialization phase to improve the convergence to the optimal weight values, and secondly, the inclusion of self-feedback weights to the wavelons of the wavelet layer. Furthermore, an on-line training procedure was proposed to enhance the control per

The increase globally fossil fuel consumption as it represents the main source of energy around the world, and the sources of heavy oil more than light, different techniques were used to reduce the viscosity and increase mobility of heavy crude oil. this study focusing on the experimental tests  and modeling with Back Feed Forward Artificial Neural Network (BFF-ANN) of the dilution technique to reduce a  heavy oil viscosity that was collected from the south- Iraq oil fields using organic solvents, organic diluents with different weight percentage  (5, 10 and  20 wt.% )  of  (n-heptane, toluene, and a mixture of  different ratio