Polymer brush coatings for combating marine biofouling

A variety of functional polymer brushes and coatings have been developed for combating marine biofouling and biocorrosion with much less environmental impact than traditional biocides. This review summarizes recent developments in marine antifouling polymer brushes and coatings that are tethered to material surfaces and do not actively release biocides. Polymer brush coatings have been designed to inhibit molecular fouling, microfouling and macrofouling through incorporation or inclusion of multiple functionalities. Hydrophilic polymers, such as poly(ethylene glycol), hydrogels, zwitterionic polymers and polysaccharides, resist attachment of marine organisms effectively due to extensive hydration. Fouling release polymer coatings, based on fluoropolymers and poly(dimethylsiloxane) elastomers, minimize adhesion between marine organisms and material surfaces, leading to easy removal of biofoulants. Polycationic coatings are effective in reducing marine biofouling partly because of their good bactericidal properties. Recent advances in controlled radical polymerization and click chemistry have also allowed better molecular design and engineering of multifunctional brush coatings for improved antifouling efficacies.     

Uptake of metal ions by chemically treated human hair

The uptake capacity of chemically treated human hair waste for the various metal ions can be arranged in the following decreasing order: Hg²⁺ (Hg⁺), Ag⁺, Pb²⁺, Cd²⁺, Cu²⁺ (Cu⁺), Cr⁶⁺, Ni²⁺, Cr³⁺.The uptake capacity is significantly affected by the presence of other metal ions. Anionic effect was found to be more pronounced for a mixed ions system than for a single ion system.     

Lightweight concrete made from oil palm shell (OPS): Structural bond and durability properties

The first part of this experimental program was to determine the structural bond properties of lightweight concrete incorporating solid waste oil palm shell (OPS) as coarse aggregate and also to compare its behaviour with other types of lightweight aggregate concretes. Other properties of OPS concrete namely the split tensile strength, modulus of rupture and modulus of elasticity were also determined. The structural bond properties were determined through pull-out test. The results showed that the experimental bond strength of OPS concrete was much higher than the design bond strength as stipulated by BS 8110. In general, the properties of OPS concrete compared well with that of other structural lightweight concretes and the results obtained encourage the use of OPS as aggregates for the production of structural lightweight concrete. The second part of the experimental program investigates the durability performance of OPS concrete through water permeability and water absorption tests.     

Cell therapy using an array of ultrathin hollow microneedles

Microsystem Technologies - Cell transplantation traditionally employs needles to inject donor cells into tissues to treat certain diseases. However, it is difficult for the current method to...     

Power Efficient SDR Implementation of IEEE 802.11a/p Physical Layer

Software defined physical layer modems can be considered the new trend in the field of communications. Differently from dedicated hardware, software can be easily modified to implement a large variety of standards on the same platform. The use of software can significantly reduce development costs, but generally comes at the price of an increase in silicon area and power consumption. For different reasons, this price is something that is not always convenient or even possible to pay, as in the case of low-cost ICs implementing a single waveform, or even multi-mode modems embedding legacy IPs already available in hardware. In particular, power consumption overhead can be prohibitive for mobile terminals or in general for battery-powered devices. The very first challenge for a computing fabric to be competitive is to find and implement the right trade-off between flexibility and performance. This was the guideline for the design of the Block Processing Engine (BPE), a template architecture conceived for power-efficient baseband processing. The BPE core feature is a mixed-grain instruction set balancing general-purpose fine-grain instructions with more specific coarse-grain instructions wrapping custom hardware modules. To further limit the power consumption, the BPE also implements instruction-pipelining, variable-size SIMD and multi-task support. To prove the efficiency of such an approach, a dual-mode IEEE 802.11a/p receiver has been implemented.     

Examining the relationships among e-government maturity,corruption, economic prosperity and environmental degradation: A cross-country analysis

There is growing interest in the role and contribution of e-government to the levels of corruption, economic prosperity and environmental degradation of nation states. In this paper, we use publicly available archival data to explore the relationships among them. Results substantiate a significant relationship between (1) e-government maturity and corruption; and (2) e-government maturity, economic prosperity and environmental degradation through the mediating effects of corruption. The findings suggest that while e-government maturity did not contribute to economic prosperity and environmental degradation, its value could be realized indirectly via its impacts on corruption. Our findings contribute to the theoretical discourse on e-government impact by identifying the role of e-government in a country and provide indications to practice on enhancing its economic prosperity and lowering its environmental degradation by managing the levels of e-government maturity and corruption.     

Effects of interface deformation on flow through microtubes containing superhydrophobic surfaces with longitudinal ribs and grooves

This paper presents analytical and numerical results for Poiseuille flow through microtubes patterned with superhydrophobic surfaces which consist of alternative ribs and grooves aligned longitudinally with the flow direction. The superhydrophobic surface prevents the flowing liquid from penetrating the grooves and the liquid–gas interface experiences deformation as a consequence of a pressure difference across the interface. Employing a domain perturbation technique, the effects of a small interface deformation on the effective slip behavior are analytically quantified. For large interface deformations, numerical studies are performed to predict the effects of interface protrusion on the effective slip behavior of the superhydrophobic microtube. Comparisons are made between the effective slip behavior for tube and channel flows patterned with superhydrophobic surfaces containing alternating longitudinal ribs and grooves.     

Editorial.

This editorial introduces the current issue of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (JTPP). It focuses on a new section developed for short discussion articles in JTPP. This new section includes short articles on critical thinking in psychology. The discussion articles in this issue are based on a symposium that was held in 2010 at the APA convention in San Diego. The symposium included contradictory voices regarding the notions of critical thinking in psychology and on the philosophical underpinnings of this competence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fabrication of Copper Nanowire Films and their Incorporation into Polymer Matrices for Antibacterial and Marine Antifouling Applications

With the ban of tributyltin, copper‐based biocides are now widely used in antifouling coatings as the major active ingredients. Given the past experience of heavy‐metal accumulation in harbors with limited water exchange, there is a significant interest in developing copper materials that greatly reduce the amount of copper ions released into marine surroundings. In this paper, copper nanowires (NWs) encapsulated in polymer matrices are investigated as the means to control the release of copper ions and to achieve a long‐lasting antifouling effect. Very long CuNWs with high aspect ratio in organic solution are drop‐coated onto substrates to fabricate uniform thin films. They are then incorporated into an elastomeric polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) matrix. A small amount of CuNWs in PDMS can inhibit barnacle cyprid settlement, while it exhibits low mortality to cyprids and nauplii present in the surrounding seawater environment. The low levels of copper released after 50 days suggest that the intersecting and interconnected CuNWs embedded in PDMS could potentially release copper ions continuously over a few years in seawater. This approach provides a novel platform to use hybrid materials as effective marine antifouling coatings, and may be applied to fouling release materials to enhance their antifouling properties.     

Output Peak Control of Nonhomogeneous Markov Jump System with Unit-Energy Disturbance

This paper considers output peak controller design for discrete nonhomogeneous Markov jump systems under unit-energy disturbance. The mode-dependent output peak feedback controller is designed to ensure that the resulting closed-loop system is stochastically stable and the peak of the output is within a specified range. Furthermore, the optimal energy-to-peak gain indices of the mode-dependent and the mode-independent state feedback controllers are evaluated and compared. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the applicability of the results obtained.