Background: Hyperfunction of the muscles of the upper lip is considered as the most common cause of excessive gingival display (EGD). The aim of this study was to demonstrate the effectiveness of botulinum toxin (BT) injection as a conservative treatment for EGD due to muscular hyperfunction and to compare the outcome of 2 injection methods. Material and methods: This study included 40 participants who were randomly assigned into 2 groups of 20 each, The first group received 2.5IU BT injection at 1 point per side (2-points group), while the second group received a total of 5 IU of BT at 2 points per side (4-points group). The outcome variables were the reduction in the central and lateral gingival display expressed as the difference between

In this paper, we propose a new and efficient ferroelectric nanostructure metal oxide lithium niobate [(Li1.075Nb0.625Ti0.45O3), (LNTO)] solid film as a saturable absorber (SA) for modulating passive Q-switched erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL). The SA is fabricated as a nanocomposite solid film by the drop-casting process in which the LNTO is planted within polyvinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene [P(VDF-TrFE)] as host copolymer. The optical and physical characteristics of the solid film are experimentally established. The SA is incorporated within the cavity of EDFL to examine its capability for producing multi-wavelength laser. The experimental results proved that a multi-wavelength laser is produced, where stable four lines with central

Nanofiltration (NF) ceramic membrane have found increasing applications particularly in wastewater and water treatment. In order to estimate and optimize the performance of NF membranes, the membrane should be characterized correctly in terms of their basic parameters such as effective pore radius (r_p) and equivalent effective thickness as well as effective surface charge ( ), the effective charge density ( ) and Donnan potential ( ). The impact of electrokinetic (zeta) potential on the membrane surface charge density, effective membrane charge density and Donnan potential at two different concentrations of the reference solutions 0.001, 0.01 M sodium chloride at various pH values from 3 to 9, and effective po

In this work, the effect of the addition of bright nickel plating and silver carried out by the electroplating method has been studied, on the coating of copper nanoparticles on the copper base metal via the process of thermal evaporation. The improvement of the solar absorber using CuNP in combination with the bright nickel and silver was obtained to be better than copper nanoparticles individually. A bright nickel enhanced the absorbed thermal stability. Also, other optical properties, absorptions, and emissivity slightly decreased from (93% to 87%), while the existence of silver had a slight impact on absorption of about (86.50%). On the other hand, thermal conductivity was evaluated using hot disk analyzer. The results showed a good

This paper presents L₁-adaptive controller for controlling uncertain parameters and time-varying unknown parameters to control the position of a DC servomotor. For the purpose of comparison, the effectiveness of L₁-adaptive controller for position control of studied servomotor has been examined and compared with another adaptive controller; Model Reference Adaptive Controller (MRAC). Robustness of both L₁-adaptive controller and model reference adaptive controller to different input reference signals and different structures of uncertainty were studied. Three different types of input signals are taken into account; ramp, step and sinusoidal. The L₁-adaptive controller ensured uniformly bounded

         The issue of penalized regression model has received considerable critical attention to variable selection. It plays an essential role in dealing with high dimensional data. Arctangent denoted by the Atan penalty has been used in both estimation and variable selection as an efficient method recently. However, the Atan penalty is very sensitive to outliers in response to variables or heavy-tailed error distribution. While the least absolute deviation is a good method to get robustness in regression estimation. The specific objective of this research is to propose a robust Atan estimator from combining these two ideas at once. Simulation experiments and real data applications show that the proposed LAD-Atan estimator

This paper proposes improving the structure of the neural controller based on the identification model for nonlinear systems. The goal of this work is to employ the structure of the Modified Elman Neural Network (MENN) model into the NARMA-L2 structure instead of Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) model in order to construct a new hybrid neural structure that can be used as an identifier model and a nonlinear controller for the SISO linear or nonlinear systems. Two learning algorithms are used to adjust the parameters weight of the hybrid neural structure with its serial-parallel configuration; the first one is supervised learning algorithm based Back Propagation Algorithm (BPA) and the second one is an intelligent algorithm n

This paper presents the Extended State Observer (ESO) based repetitive control (RC) for piezoelectric actuator (PEA) based nano-positioning systems. The system stability is proved using Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs), which guarantees the asymptotic stability of the system. The ESObased RC used in this paper has the ability to eliminate periodic disturbances, aperiodic disturbances and model uncertainties. Moreover, ESO can be tuned using only two parameters and the model free approach of ESO-based RC, makes it an ideal solution to overcome the challenges of nano-positioning system control. Different types of periodic and aperiodic disturbances are used in simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm. The comparison studi