A formulation to model the nonlinear viscoelastic properties of the vascular tissue

Nearly all soft tissues, including the vascular tissue, present a certain degree of viscoelastic material response, which becomes apparent performing multiple relaxation tests over a wide range of strain levels and plotting the resulting stress relaxation curves, nonlinear viscoelasticity of the tissue. Changes in relaxation rate at each strain may occur at multiple strain levels. A constitutive formulation considering the particular features of the vascular tissue, such as anisotropy, together with these nonlinear viscoelastic phenomena is here presented and used to fit stress?Cstretch curves from experimental relaxation tests. This constitutive model was used to fit several data set of in vitro experimental stress relaxation tests performed on ovine and porcine aorta. The good fitting of the experimental data shows the capability of the model to reproduce the viscoelastic response of the vascular tissue.     

Structural Explanation of the Dielectric Enhancement of Barium Titanate Nanoparticles Grown under Hydrothermal Conditions

When synthesized under certain conditions, barium titanate (BaTiO₃, BTO) nanoparticles are found to have the non-thermodynamic cubic structure at room temperature. These particles also have a several-fold enhanced dielectric constant, sometimes exceeding 6000, and are widely used in thin-layer capacitors. A hydrothermal approach is used to synthesize BTO nanocrystals, which are characterized by a range of methods, including X-ray Rietveld refinement and the Williamson–Hall approach, revealing the presence of significant inhomogeneous strain associated with the cubic phase. However, X-ray pair distribution function measurements clearly show the local structure is lower symmetry than cubic. This apparent inconsistency is resolved by examining 3D Bragg coherent diffraction images of selected nanocrystals, which show the existence of ≈50 nm-sized domains, which are interpreted as tetragonal twins, and yet cause the average crystalline structure to appear cubic. The ability of these twin boundaries to migrate under the influence of electric fields explains the dielectric anomaly for the nanocrystalline phase.     

Segmentation of retinal blood vessels by combining the detection of centerlines and morphological reconstruction

This paper presents an automated method for the segmentation of the vascular network in retinal images. The algorithm starts with the extraction of vessel centerlines, which are used as guidelines for the subsequent vessel filling phase. For this purpose, the outputs of four directional differential operators are processed in order to select connected sets of candidate points to be further classified as centerline pixels using vessel derived features. The final segmentation is obtained using an iterative region growing method that integrates the contents of several binary images resulting from vessel width dependent morphological filters. Our approach was tested on two publicly available databases and its results are compared with recently published methods. The results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms other solutions and approximates the average accuracy of a human observer without a significant degradation of sensitivity and specificity.     

SNR gap approximation for M-PSK-Based bit loading

Adaptive OFDM has the potential of providing bandwidth-efficient communications in hostile propagation environments. Currently, bit loading algorithms use M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation of the OFDM sub-carriers, where the number of bits per symbol modulating each of them is obtained in order to maximize the performance. SNR gap approximation for M-QAM signaling makes the algorithms simpler to implement. However, in some circumstances it may be preferable to use. M-ary phase shift keying. In this letter an approximation is derived for M-PSK similar to the SNR gap of M-QAM so that bit loading algorithms can be extended to this type of modulation. In addition, the performance obtained when using M-PSK is compared to that of M-QAM in a practical situation.     

Study of Complete Thermoelectric Generator Behavior Including Water-to-Ambient Heat Dissipation on the Cold Side

Reduction of the thermal resistances of the heat exchangers of a thermoelectric generation (TEG) system leads to a significant increase in TEG efficiency. For the cold side of a thermoelectric module (TEM), a wide range of heat exchangers have been studied, from simple finned dissipators to more complex water (water–glycol) heat exchangers. As the Nusselt number is much higher in water heat exchangers than in conventional air finned dissipators, the convective thermal resistances are better. However, to conclude which heat exchanger leads to higher efficiencies, it is necessary to include the whole system involved in the heat dissipation, i.e., the TEM-to-water heat exchanger, the water-to-ambient heat exchanger, as well as the required pumps and fans. This paper presents a dynamic computational model able to simulate the complete behavior of a TEG, including both heat exchangers. The model uses the heat transfer and hydraulic equations to compute the TEM-to-water and water-to-ambient thermal resistances, along with the resistance of the hot-side heat exchanger at different operating conditions. Likewise, the model includes all the thermoelectric effects with temperature-dependent properties. The model calculates the net power generation for different configurations, providing a methodology to design and optimize the heat exchange in order to maximize the net power generation for a wide variety of TEGs.     

Optimization of Nonlinear Transmission Lines for Harmonic Generation: The Role of the Capacitance-Voltage Characteristic and the Area Effect

In this paper, nonlinear transmission lines (NLTLs) periodically loaded with symmetric voltage dependent capacitances are investigated by means of computer simulation. Specifically, we have studied the role that the C-V characteristic plays on the performance of NLTLs as frequency multipliers. The main conclusion of the work is that the area under the C(V) curve is a key parameter for the optimization of conversion efficiency. This result is interpreted on the basis of soliton like propagation in NLTLs.