The dynamic thermomechanical properties, sealing ability, and voids formation of an experimental obturation hydroxyapatite-reinforced polyethylene (HA/PE) composite/carrier system were investigated and compared with those of a commercial system [GuttaCore (GC)]. The HA/PE system was specifically designed using a melt-extrusion process. The viscoelastic properties of HA/PE were determined using a dynamic thermomechanical analyser. Human single-rooted teeth were endodontically instrumented and obturated using HA/PE or GC systems, and then sealing ability was assessed using a fluid filtration system. In addition, micro-computed tomography (μCT) was used to quantify apparent voids within the root-canal space. The data were statistically analys

This study depicts the removal of Manganese ions (Mn2+) from simulated wastewater by combined electrocoagulation/ electroflotation technologies. The effects of initial Mn concentration, current density (C.D.), electrolysis time, and different mesh numbers of stainless steel screen electrodes were investigated in a batch cell by adopting Taguchi experimental design to explore the optimum conditions for maximum removal efficiency of Mn. The results of multiple regression and signal to noise ratio (S/N) showed that the optimum conditions were Mn initial concentration of 100 ppm, C.D. of 4 mA/cm2, time of 120 min, and mesh no. of 30 (wire/inch). Also, the relative significance of each factor was attained by the analysis of variance (ANO

Infrared photoconductive detectors working in the far-infrared region and room temperature were fabricated. The detectors were fabricated using three types of carbon nanotubes (CNTs); MWCNTs, COOH-MWCNTs, and short-MWCNTs. The carbon nontubes suspension is deposited by dip coating and drop–casting techniques to prepare thin films of CNTs. These films were deposited on porous silicon (PSi) substrates of n-type Si. The I-V characteristics and the figures of merit of the fabricated detectors were measured at a forward bias voltage of 3 and 5 volts as well as at dark and under illumination by IR radiation from a CO2 laser of 10.6 μm wavelengths and power of 2.2 W. The responsivity and figures of merit of the photoconductive detector

The behavior and shear strength of full-scale (T-section) reinforced concrete deep beams, designed according to the strut-and-tie approach of ACI Code-19 specifications, with various large web openings were investigated in this paper. A total of 7 deep beam specimens with identical shear span-to-depth ratios have been tested under mid-span concentrated load applied monotonically until beam failure. The main variables studied were the effects of width and depth of the web openings on deep beam performance. Experimental data results were calibrated with the strut-and-tie approach, adopted by ACI 318-19 code for the design of deep beams. The provided strut-and-tie design model in ACI 318-19 code provision was assessed and found to be u

A frequently used approach for denoising is the shrinkage of coefficients of the noisy signal representation in a transform domain. This paper proposes an algorithm based on hybrid transform (stationary wavelet transform proceeding by slantlet transform); The slantlet transform is applied to the approximation subband of the stationary wavelet transform. BlockShrink thresholding technique is applied to the hybrid transform coefficients. This technique can decide the optimal block size and thresholding for every wavelet subband by risk estimate (SURE). The proposed algorithm was executed by using MATLAB R2010aminimizing Stein’s unbiased with natural images contaminated by white Gaussian noise. Numerical results show that our algorithm co

Image recognition is one of the most important applications of information processing, in this paper; a comparison between 3-level techniques based image recognition has been achieved, using discrete wavelet (DWT) and stationary wavelet transforms (SWT), stationary-stationary-stationary (sss), stationary-stationary-wavelet (ssw), stationary-wavelet-stationary (sws), stationary-wavelet-wavelet (sww), wavelet-stationary- stationary (wss), wavelet-stationary-wavelet (wsw), wavelet-wavelet-stationary (wws) and wavelet-wavelet-wavelet (www). A comparison between these techniques has been implemented. according to the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), root mean square error (RMSE), compression ratio (CR) and the coding noise e (n) of each third

Advances in digital technology and the World Wide Web has led to the increase of digital documents that are used for various purposes such as publishing and digital library. This phenomenon raises awareness for the requirement of effective techniques that can help during the search and retrieval of text. One of the most needed tasks is clustering, which categorizes documents automatically into meaningful groups. Clustering is an important task in data mining and machine learning. The accuracy of clustering depends tightly on the selection of the text representation method. Traditional methods of text representation model documents as bags of words using term-frequency index document frequency (TFIDF). This method ignores the relationship an

The feature extraction step plays major role for proper object classification and recognition, this step depends mainly on correct object detection in the given scene, the object detection algorithms may result with some noises that affect the final object shape, a novel approach is introduced in this paper for filling the holes in that object for better object detection and for correct feature extraction, this method is based on the hole definition which is the black pixel surrounded by a connected boundary region, and hence trying to find a connected contour region that surrounds the background pixel using roadmap racing algorithm, the method shows a good results in 2D space objects.
Keywords: object filling, object detection, objec

The agent-based modeling is currently utilized extensively to analyze complex systems. It supported such growth, because it was able to convey distinct levels of interaction in a complex detailed environment. Meanwhile, agent-based models incline to be progressively complex. Thus, powerful modeling and simulation techniques are needed to address this rise in complexity. In recent years, a number of platforms for developing agent-based models have been developed. Actually, in most of the agents, often discrete representation of the environment, and one level of interaction are presented, where two or three are regarded hardly in various agent-based models. The key issue is that modellers work in these areas is not assisted by simulation plat