Visual Detection of Adenosine Triphosphate by Taylor Rising: A Simple Point-of-Care Testing Method Based on Rolling Circle Amplification

Rapid and sensitive point-of-care testing (POCT) is an extremely critical mission in practical applications, especially for rigorous military medicine, home health care, and in the third world. Here, we report a visual POCT method for adenosine triphosphate (ATP) detection based on Taylor rising in the corner of quadratic geometries between two rod surfaces. We discuss the principle of Taylor rising, demonstrating that it is significantly influenced by contact angle, surface tension, and density of the sample, which are controlled by ATP-dependent rolling circle amplification (RCA). In the presence of ATP, RCA reaction effectively suppresses Taylor-rising behavior, due to the increased contact angle, density, and decreased surface tension. Without addition of ATP, untriggered RCA reaction is favorable for Taylor rising, resulting in a significant height. With this proposed method, visual sensitive detection of ATP without the aid of other instruments is realized with only a 5 μL droplet, which has good selectivity and a low detection limit (17 nM). Importantly, this visual method provides a promising POCT tool for user-friendly molecular diagnostics.     

Durable,Sensitive, and Wide‐Range Wearable Pressure Sensors Based on Wavy‐Structured Flexible Conductive Composite Film

Flexible pressure sensors have potential applications in human motion monitoring and electronic skins. To satisfy the practical applications, pressure sensors with a high sensitivity, a low detection limit, a broad response range, and an excellent stability are highly needed. Here, a piezoresistive pressure sensor based on wavy‐structured single‐walled carbon nanotube/graphite flake/thermoplastic polyurethane (SWCNT/GF/TPU) composite film is fabricated by a prestretching process. Due to the random wavy structure, high conductivity, and good flexibility, the prepared sensor displays a low detection limit of 2 Pa, a wide sensing range of 0–60 kPa, and a high sensitivity of 5.49 kPa^?1 for 0–50 Pa. Furthermore, the sensor shows a remarkable repeatability of over 1.1 × 10⁴, 9.0 × 10³, and 2.0 × 10³ pressure loading/unloading cycles at 50 Pa, 500 Pa, and 30 kPa, respectively, and a fast responsibility of 100–150 ms of loading response time and 400–600 ms of relaxation time. Therefore, the pressure sensor is successfully adopted to monitor both the large‐scale human activities (e.g., walk and jump) and the small‐scale signals (e.g., wrist pulse). Furthermore, a sensor array is assembled to map the weight and shape of an object, indicating its various potential applications including human–machine interactions, human health monitoring, and other wearable electronics.     

Finite element piezothermoelasticity analysis and the active control of FGM plates with integrated piezoelectric sensors and actuators

 An efficient finite element model is presented for the static and dynamic piezothermoelastic analysis and control of FGM plates under temperature gradient environments using integrated piezoelectric sensor/actuator layers. The properties of an FGM plate are functionally graded in the thickness direction according to a volume fraction power law distribution. A constant displacement-cum-velocity feedback control algorithm that couples the direct and inverse piezoelectric effects is applied to provide active feedback control of the integrated FGM plate in a closed loop system. Numerical results for the static and dynamic control are presented for the FGM plate, which consists of zirconia and aluminum. The effects of the constituent volume fractions and the influence of feedback control gain on the static and dynamic responses of the FGM plates are examined. Received: 13 March 2002 / Accepted: 5 March 2003 The work described in this paper was supported by a grant awarded by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. CityU 1024/01E).     

一种新颖的表面等离子谐振效应光波导水质传感技术

光学表面等离子谐振（ＳＰＲ）效应是一种很有效的水质检测技术，经过详细的理论推导，同了ＳＰＲ反射光强的普遍适用公式。在纯水与受污染水两种情况下，根据一些已知参数计算出结果。由计算结果数据一出的曲线比较表明，ＳＰＲ效应在两种情况下有明显差别，这也正是ＳＰＲ效应用于水质检测的理论根据。     

光纤荧光传感器衰减寿命的加权对数拟合法

荧光寿命的检测是荧光光学传感器的核心内容，国际上尝试了多种方法来拟合这种理论上为单指数衰减信号的荧光衰减曲线。这些方法包括非线性函数标准拟合方法。即Levenburg-Marquardt方法，以及Prony方法、FFT方法，对数拟合法等等。为了克服在实际应用中发生的信号退化，需要在测量信号衰减寿命的同时测量信号的初始强度。文章介绍了一种加权的对数拟合法，经计算机仿真及实际数据测试均可以得到和Levenburg-Marquardt方法非常接近的结果，且拟合时间大大缩短，测量稳定性大大提高。仿真测试及具体实验测试结果显示了这种方法的有效性。该方法不仅与Levenburg-Marquardt方法的偏差曲线非常相似，而且实验测得的荧光寿命与Levenburg-Marquardt方法偏差在0．2％以内。     

Integrated Smart Sensor Calibration

In many applications electronic sensors are used toimprove performance and reliability of measurement systems. Suchsensors should provide a correct transfer from the physical signalto be measured to the electrical output signal. One importantstep to achieve this, is to calibrate each sensor by applyingdifferent reference input signals and adjusting the sensor transferaccordingly. Besides expensive reference equipment the calibrationprocess takes much time and attention per individual sensor,which means a considerable increase in sensor production costs.By including at the sensor or sensor interface chip a programmablecalibration facility the calibration of such smart sensors caneasily be automated and can be executed for a batch of sensorsat a time, thus minimizing the calibration time and costs. Thispaper presents a calibration method and options for integrationin the smart sensor concept, in hardware as well as in software.An advantage of the proposed method is that it does not needa large matrix of calibration data, which needs to be storedin a look-up table or converted into a correction formula, butinstead it uses a step-by-step approach to correct the sensortransfer at each calibration measurement until the error is sufficientlysmall.     

具有再生反馈雷达的角跟踪性能闭环测试

本文论述了用雷达跟踪目标最大角速度和角加速表征具有再生反馈雷达角跟踪性能的合理性,并论述了用单片机测试雷达跟踪目标最大角速度和最大角加速的方法。