Evaluation of direct light processing for the fabrication of bioactive ceramic scaffolds: Effect of pore/strut size on manufacturability and mechanical performance

Bioactive ceramic scaffolds for bone regeneration consisting of a three-dimensional mesh of interpenetrating struts with square section were fabricated via Digital Light Processing (DLP). The ability of the technique to manufacture 3D porous structures from β-tricalcium phosphate (β-TCP) powders with different dimensions of struts and pores was evaluated, identifying the possibilities and limitations of the manufacturing process. Small pore sizes were found to seriously complicate the elimination of excess slurry from the scaffold’s innermost pores. The effect of the strut/pore size on the mechanical performance of the scaffolds under compressive stresses was also evaluated, but no significant influence was found. Under compressive stresses, the structures resulted weaker when tested perpendicularly to the printing plane due to interlayer shear failure. Interlayer superficial grooves are proposed as potential failure-controlling defects, which could also explain the lack of a Weibull size effect on the mechanical strength of the fabricated DLP scaffolds.     

Fabrication and properties of 3D printed zirconia scaffold coated with calcium silicate/hydroxyapatite

The scaffold of bone repair needs a variety of material combinations to meet its intended performance; a typical single material such as zirconia has excellent mechanical properties, while hydroxyapatite and calcium silicate are bioactive materials with different degradation rates. In this paper, porous zirconia scaffolds were fabricated using 3D printing technology. The surface of the scaffold was coated by dipping with different contents of calcium silicate and hydroxyapatite to improve the biological activity and mechanical properties. Mechanical tests show that the coating material can effectively fill the pores of the porous scaffold, increasing its compressive strength by an average of 55%. The simulated body fluid (SBF) test showed that the higher calcium silicate in the coating increased the degradation rate. Cell experiments showed that the coated scaffolds exhibited good cytocompatibility and were beneficial to the proliferation and differentiation of cells. In conclusion, coated scaffolds have potential applications in the field of bone repair.     

Piezoelectric properties and microstructure of ceramicrete-based piezoelectric composites

Inorganic piezoelectric ceramic composite is the potential sensing element for long-term structural health monitoring due to its excellent durability and compatibility. In this study, a Ceramicrete-based piezoelectric composite is proposed preliminarily, in which the magnesium potassium phosphate cement is used as the matrix and the lead zirconate titanate particle is utilized as the functional phase. Piezoelectric properties test and microstructure analysis are performed to evaluate the testing samples. Results show that the piezoelectric performance of the composite increase with the increase of piezoelectric ceramic particle size. The value of the piezoelectric strain factor (d₃₃) can reach 83.8 pC/N, while the corresponding piezoelectric voltage factor (g₃₃) is 50.1 × 10^-3 V•m/N at the 50th day after polarization. Microstructure analysis illustrates that the interfacial transition zone (ITZ) between the matrix and the particles is dense. Moreover, the influence of aging on the composite is attributed to the continuous hydration after polarization. It indicates that the composites have a higher piezoelectric performance, which can be regarded as a promising sensing element material.     

Optical and electrical properties of ITO film on flexible fluorphlogopite substrate

Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) films were prepared, at room temperature, on a fluorphlogopite substrate using magnetron sputtering technology. At various temperatures of 500 °C, 600 °C, 700 °C, 800 °C, and 900 °C, the samples were (had) annealed for 2 h (a 2-h duration). The results showed improvement in the crystalline performance of ITO film at selected annealing temperatures, with a significant reduction in resistivity at 800 °C. The lowest resistivity is 4.08 × 10^?4 Ω-cm, which is nearly an order of magnitude lower than the unannealed sample. All samples have an average light transmittance above 85% in the visible light range (400–800 nm), and with increasing annealing temperature, the average light transmittance tends to decrease. Besides, at the sensitive wavelength of 550 nm, the light transmittance is as high as 93.74%. The sheet resistance testing of the sample was through the number of bending times, which revealed that with the increase of the number of bending, the sheet resistance increases. However, after 1200 bending times, the change rate of the sheet resistance remains below 5%. Thus, the ITO film prepared on the flexible fluorphlogopite substrate revealed excellent optical and electrical properties, good flexibility, and improved stability after high-temperature annealing, which guarantees successful application in flexible electronic devices.     

How Mixing and Light Heterogeneity Impact the Overall Growth Rate in Photobioreactors

The microalgae growth rate in photobioreactors responds with inertia to light stimuli. Here, light variations experienced by the algae are accessed through a coupling of an irradiance field calculation and a Lagrangian particle tracking. The response of algae to fluctuating light is then described by a relaxation model involving a single time constant, the value of which is identified from published data. The overall growth rate is calculated as the sum of individual growth rates of all particles. Instantaneous adaptation and full integration asymptotic behaviors are recovered whilst a finite time constant reveals that the overall growth rate is dependent both on mixing and light distribution. This methodology thus quantitatively relates the design parameters to the photobioreactor performance.     

Various density light field image coding based on distortion minimization interpolation

In recent years, the light field (LF) as a new imaging modality has attracted wide interest. The large data volume of LF images poses great challenge to LF image coding, and the LF images captured by different devices show significant differences in angular domain. In this paper we propose a view prediction framework to handle LF image coding with various sampling density. All LF images are represented as view arrays. We first partition the views into reference view (RV) set and intermediate view (IV) set. The RVs are rearranged into a pseudo sequence and directly compressed by a video encoder. Other views are then predicted by the RVs. To exploit the four dimensional signal structure, we propose the linear approximation prior (LAP) to reveal the correlation among LF views and efficiently remove the LF data redundancy. Based on the LAP, a distortion minimization interpolation (DMI) method is used to predict IVs. To robustly handle the LF images with different sampling density, we propose an Iteratively Updating depth image based rendering (IU-DIBR) method to extend our DMI. Some auxiliary views are generated to cover the target region and then the DMI calculates reconstruction coefficients for the IVs. Different view partition patterns are also explored. Extensive experiments on different types LF images also valid the efficiency of the proposed method.     

Chromaticity-tunable remote LuYAG: Ce phosphor-in-glass film on regular textured glass substrate for white light emitting diodes

All inorganic remote phosphor-in-glass film exhibits excellent properties in high power white light-emitting-diodes (WLEDs) thanks to their easy fabrication and thermal stability. Herein, fabrication of (Lu, Y)₃Al₅O₁₂: Ce³⁺ (LuYAG: Ce)phosphors embedded in borosilicate glass film by the conventional solid state reaction and spin coating technology has been reported. The introduction of Y³⁺ ions reduces the difference of relative growth rate along some directions in growth of LuYAG microparticles, yielding a finer grain with smooth edges. By adjusting the molar concentration of Y³⁺ ions in LuAG phosphor, a series of tunable broadband emission from green to yellow region is observed and maintains excellent thermal stability. Meanwhile, the decay curves of samples with different Y³⁺ are almost same. SEM images show that phosphor particles are homogenously distributed within the glass matrix and keep their original morphology, suggesting the phosphor-in-glass films were synthesized as expected. Finally, a simple WLEDs based on the films was constructed using the commercial blue chip. The correlated color temperature ranging from 4853K to 4627K and high color rendering index from 81.4–79.7 were obtained. Upon the different driving current, the chromaticity coordinates of as-fabricated film exhibit good light color stability. These results bring an inspiring insight to tune the luminescent performance for remote WLEDs.     

CO2 sensing properties and mechanism of PrFeO3 and NdFeO3 thick film sensor

The CO_2 sensing of PrFeO_3 and NdFeO_3 sensors were investigated. Experimental results show that the resistances for PrFeO_3 and NdFeO_3 in CO_2 gas are larger than those in air and the responses for PrFeO_3and NdFeO_3 sensors increase with an increase in room-temperature relative humidity. When exposed to1000 ppm CO_2, the response of PrFeO_3 thick film based on nano-powders annealed at 700℃can reach8.44 at 160℃for the background of wet air with 58%of room-temperature relative humidity (RH),which is much larger than the corresponding value (3.03) in wet air with 25%RH. The sensing response S of NdFeO_3 thick-film sensor based on nano-powders annealed at 600℃to 3000 ppm CO_2 at the operating temperature 200℃can reach 2.36 for the background of wet air with 72%RH, which is larger than the corresponding value (1.83) in the air with 25%RH. Compared with other CO_2 sensing materials, the PrFeO_3 sensor has larger response at lower operating temperature for CO_2 gas and may be used as a new CO_2 sensing material.     

An integrated method based on energy concentration for evaluating normally distributed spectra in the visible region

This work proposes a method to scientifically quantify the quality of normally distributed visible spectra from the viewpoint of energy concentration: high transmittance, narrow spectral width, and small deviation from the target wavelength in the target region. In the proposed method, the spectral width of the spectrum is compared with that of a reference spectrum before its deviation from the target wavelength is examined. After extracting the maximum transmittance, a performance index of the spectrum is obtained in a percentile value. The effectiveness of the proposed method was analytically proven by surface plasmon resonance-generated spectra with five design features and five variations in each feature. The results indicated that the proposed method not only substantially reflected the predictions made by intuitive visual inspections, but also avoided misleading and ambiguous results evaluated by existing full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM) method, figure-of-merit (FOM) method, and coordinates on the chromaticity diagram. In addition to the numerical analysis, the experimentally obtained spectra of phosphors in white light emitting diodes were also evaluated. The results proved that the proposed method can successfully highlight the scaled performance difference among the spectra, which is not supported by existing FWHM and FOM methods by simultaneously considering the aforementioned three characteristics of a spectrum.     

Component spectroscopic properties of light-harvesting complexes with DFT calculations

Photosynthesis is a fundamental process in biosciences and biotechnology that influences profoundly the research in other disciplines. In this paper, we focus on the characterization of fundamental components, present in pigment-protein complexes, in terms of their spectroscopic properties such as infrared spectra, nuclear magnetic resonance, as well as nuclear quadrupole resonance, which are of critical importance for many applications. Such components include chlorophylls and bacteriochlorophylls. Based on the density functional theory method, we calculate the main spectroscopic characteristics of these components for the Fenna-Matthews-Olson light-harvesting complex, analyze them and compare them with available experimental results. Future outlook is discussed in the context of current and potential applications of the presented results.