Influence of accelerated ageing on methacrylate‐based denture resins heterogeneity as viewed by ESR‐spin‐probe method

The electron‐spin‐resonance (ESR) spin‐probe method, was used to study the heterogeneity of denture resins based on poly(methyl methacrylate). Results for three resins processed by microwave energy, conventional curing and cold curing (depending on the curing procedure and exposed to ageing in various environmental conditions) were compared. All three cured resins were stored over the same time (1200 h) in distilled water at ambient temperature and in artificial saliva at 348 K. The temperature‐dependent ESR spectra of a spin probe dispersed in the denture resins are analyzed in terms of line‐shapes and line‐widths. The appearance of two spectral components was taken as an indication of resin heterogeneity. The results reveal that the cold‐cured resin has a lower local density in comparison with microwave and conventionally cured resin. The amount of residual monomer also contributes to the local motion of polymer segments. The change of denture resins exposed to ageing is influenced both by the structure of the original resin and the ageing conditions. Restricted motion of a spin probe incorporated into the acrylic resins exposed to accelerated ageing suggests additional crosslinking of polymer chains. The differences are observed for all the investigated resins, but the highest change is observed with the cold‐cured resin. The ESR results are accompanied by T_g and T_m measurements. Copyright © 2005 Society of Chemical Industry     

Original Finger Image Extraction by Morphological Technique and Finger Image Comparisons for Persons' Identification

This research uses the object extracting technique to extract the index, middle and ring fingers from the hand images. The algorithm developed in this research can find the precise locations of the different fingers' fingertips and the finger-to-finger-valleys. After finding the positions of the fingertips and finger-valleys, the index, middle and ring fingers can be extracted from the hand images by using morphological technique. The extracted index, middle and ring fingers contain many useful geometry features. One can use these features to do the person's identification. The orientations of the index, middle and ring fingers are found in this research. Image rotating, image shifting, and image interpolating techniques are used to align different persons' index, middle and ring fingers. Image subtraction is used to exam the difference of two index, middle and ring finger images. In this research so far only use the index, middle and the ring fingers as the features to identify different persons. ^★This work was supported by National Science Council under grant NSC 93-2213-E-212-011.     

Visual evaluation at scale of threshold to suprathreshold color difference

Visual evaluation experiments of color discrimination threshold and suprathreshold color‐difference comparison were carried out using CRT colors based on the psychophysical methods of interleaved staircase and constant stimuli, respectively. A large set of experimental data was generated ranged from threshold to large suprathreshold color difference at the five CIE color centers. The visual data were analyzed in detail for every observer at each visual scale to show the effect of color‐difference magnitude on the observer precision. The chromaticity ellipses from this study were compared with four previous published data, of CRT colors by Cui and Luo, and of surface colors by RIT‐DuPont, Cheung and Rigg, and Guan and Luo, to report the reproducibility of this kind of experiment using CRT colors and the variations between CRT and surface data, respectively. The present threshold data were also compared against the different suprathreshold data to show the effect of color‐difference scales. The visual results were further used to test the three advance color‐difference formulae, CMC, CIE94, and CIEDE2000, together with the basic CIELAB equation. In their original forms or with optimized K_L values, the CIEDE2000 outperformed others, followed by CMC, and with the CIELAB and CIE94 the poorest for predicting the combined dataset of all color centers in the present study. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 30, 198–208, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/col.20106     

Reconstruction of Mandibular Defect with Porous β-TCP/BMG Artificial Bone

1Introduction Reconstructivesurgeryisoneofthehottestre searchedsubjectsthatdealingwithbonedefects.Thetra ditionalmethodisimplantationoffreshautograftbonebe causeofitsnon immunoreactiveproperty.Butautologousbonewasnotabundantinsomecases.Sowefoundbeta trica…     

Formation of composites fabricated by exothermic dispersion reaction in A1-TiO2-B2O3 system

The formation of aluminum matrix composites fabricated by exothermic dispersion reaction in A1-TiO2-B2O3 system was investigated. The thermal analysis results show that the reactions are spontaneous and exothermic. The Gibbs free energy of α-Al2O3 is the lowest among all the combustion products, followed by TiB2 and Al3Ti. It is noted that when the B2O3/TiO2 mole ratio is below 1, the reaction products are composed of particle-like α-Al2O3, TiB2 and rod-like Al3Ti. The α-Al2O3 crystallites, resulting from the reaction between A1 and TiO2 or B2O3, are segregated at the grain boundaries due to a lower wettability with the matrix. SEM micrographs show that rod-like Al3Ti phase distributes uniformly in the matrix. When the BEO3/TiO2 mole ratio is around 1, the Al3Ti phase almost disappears in the composites, and the distribution of α-Al2O3 particulates is improved evidently.     

Preparation and Compressive Stress Effect of Polymer Matrix RE-Fe Giant Magnetostrictive Composite

Polymer matrix RE-Fe giant magnetostrictire composite （GMPC） was prepared using bonding and magnetic field forming technique, and magnetostriction of samples was measured for different compressive stress. The experimental results show thai there is certain compressive effect in GMPC. And the influence of compressive stress on magnetostriction of sample was investigated. It offers essential reference for application and device design of GMPC.     

General Solution for the Dynamic Modeling of Parallel Robots

In this paper, we present a general method to calculate the inverse and direct dynamic models of parallel robots. The models are expressed in a closed form by a single equation in which all the elements needed are expressed. The solution is given in terms of the dynamic models of the legs, the dynamics of the platform and some Jacobian matrices. The proposed method is applied in this paper on two parallel robots with different structures. Categories (2), (3).     

Average consensus in networks of dynamic agents with switching topologies and multiple time-varying delays

In this paper, we discuss average consensus problem in undirected networks of dynamic agents with fixed and switching topologies as well as multiple time-varying communication delays. By employing a linear matrix inequality method, we prove that all the nodes in the network achieve average consensus asymptotically for appropriate communication delays if the network topology is connected. Particularly, several feasible linear matrix inequalities are established to determine the maximal allowable upper bound of time-varying communication delays. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and the sharpness of the theoretical results.     

The effects of recent practice on task switching.

Four experiments investigated the effect of recent selective practice on the cost of switching between 2 tasks afforded by letter-digit pairs: alphabet arithmetic and shape comparison. Experiments 1 and 2 found a greater cost associated with switching to the more recently practiced task: evidence that task-set inertia contributes to switching costs. Experiment 3 found this effect to be limited to trials on which a recently trained stimulus followed another such stimulus: a result problematic for all current theories of task-set priming. Experiment 4 showed that the effect of recent practice was eliminated by active preparation for a task switch: It appears that endogenous task-set preparation reduces the effects of task-set inertia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A parallel and scalable algorithm for ADI method with pre-propagation and message vectorization

It is hard to implement the ADI method in an efficient way on distributed-memory parallel computers. We propose “P-scheme” which parallelizes a tridiagonal linear system of equations for the ADI method, but its effectiveness is limited to the cases where the problem size is large enough mainly because of the communication cost of the propagation phase of the scheme.

In order to overcome this difficulty, we propose an improved version of the P-scheme with “message vectorization” which aggregates several communication messages into one and alleviates the communication cost. Also we evaluate the effectiveness of message vectorization for the ADI method and show that the improved version of the P-scheme works well even for smaller problems and linear and super-linear speedups can be achieved for 8194 × 8194 and 16,386 × 16,386 problems, respectively.