3D Printing and Nanotechnology: A Multiscale Alliance in Personalized Medicine

3D printing and nanotechnology have been two important tools in the development of therapeutic approaches for personalized medicine. More recently, their alliance has been improved in an effort to build innovative, versatile, multifunctional, and/or smart medical and pharmaceutical products. Therefore, an extensive review about scientific studies that ally 3D printing and nanomaterials in the development of new approaches for pharmaceutical and medical applications for the treatment and prevention of diseases is presented here. The articles are classified into five categories according to their main application: Cell growth and tissue engineering, antimicrobial, drug delivery, stimulus-response, and theranostics. Semisolid extrusion, inorganic nanoparticles, and cell growth and tissue engineering are the most reported 3D printing technique, type of nanomaterial, and application, respectively. The increase in papers dedicated to these areas is also notable, especially in the 2019 and 2020, when semisolid extrusion became the most used technique, overcoming fused deposition modelling. In fact, this review highlights that the possibility of an alliance between 3D printing and nanotechnology for the production of multiscale materials is undoubtedly a great opportunity for knowledge and innovation in the pharmaceutical and medical area.     

Thermoelectric Polymer Aerogels for Pressure–Temperature Sensing Applications

The evolution of the society is characterized by an increasing flow of information from things to the internet. Sensors have become the cornerstone of the internet‐of‐everything as they track various parameters in the society and send them to the cloud for analysis, forecast, or learning. With the many parameters to sense, sensors are becoming complex and difficult to manufacture. To reduce the complexity of manufacturing, one can instead create advanced functional materials that react to multiple stimuli. To this end, conducting polymer aerogels are promising materials as they combine elasticity and sensitivity to pressure and temperature. However, the challenge is to read independently pressure and temperature output signals without cross‐talk. Here, a strategy to fully decouple temperature and pressure reading in a dual‐parameter sensor based on thermoelectric polymer aerogels is demonstrated. It is found that aerogels made of poly(3,4‐ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) can display properties of semiconductors lying at the transition between insulator and semimetal upon exposure to high boiling point polar solvents, such as dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO). Importantly, because of the temperature‐independent charge transport observed for DMSO‐treated PEDOT‐based aerogel, a decoupled pressure and temperature sensing can be achieved without cross‐talk in the dual‐parameter sensor devices.     

Fully digital BPSK demodulator for satellite supressed carrier telecommand system

In this paper, we present the design of a fully digital binary phase shift keying demodulator for application in satellite high‐rate suppressed carrier telecommand system. The proposed system digitalizes the received signal in the intermediate frequency stage using bandpass sampling technique, and the resulting baseband signal is used to synchronization of symbol and phase and to bit detection. The design of all functional modules is presented in details. Another innovation presented in this work is the inclusion of a non‐linearity in the phase synchronizer module to permit its operation independent from the signal amplitude. Moreover, aiming the characterization and performance evaluation of the system, we do some original mathematical analyses. Finally, test results show that the demodulator complies all the project requirements, and the prototype implementation loss, in terms of bit energy to noise power density ratio, is less than 0.3 dB. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A fast and efficient hybrid fractal-wavelet image coder.

The excellent visual quality and compression rate of fractal image coding have limited applications due to exhaustive inherent encoding time. This paper presents a new fast and efficient image coder that applies the speed of the wavelet transform to the image quality of the fractal compression. Fast fractal encoding using Fisher's domain classification is applied to the lowpass subband of wavelet transformed image and a modified set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) coding, on the remaining coefficients. Furthermore, image details and wavelet progressive transmission characteristics are maintained, no blocking effects from fractal techniques are introduced, and the encoding fidelity problem common in fractal-wavelet hybrid coders is solved. The proposed scheme promotes an average of 94% reduction in encoding-decoding time comparing to the pure accelerated Fractal coding results. The simulations also compare the results to the SPIHT wavelet coding. In both cases, the new scheme improves the subjective quality of pictures for high-medium-low bitrates.     

Transmission Strategies for MISO Downlink MC-CDMA Mobile Systems

This paper proposes two space-frequency schemes with a multi-user pre-filtering technique for downlink (DL) multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) systems. We consider the use of antenna arrays at the base station (BS) and a single antenna at the mobile terminal (MT) and derive the proposed multi-user pre-filtering technique that modulates the transmitted signal to eliminate the effects of multiple access interference (MAI) and channel distortions at the mobile terminals, while maintaining low MT complexity. Two types of detectors are considered at the MT: simple despreading and single user equalizers. The performances of the proposed schemes are compared to those of other transmit signal design approaches that have been recently proposed for DL MC-CDMA, considering both typical indoor and pedestrian scenarios, and channel coding based on UMTS specifications.     

Interregional and interannual variability of ethanol site-specific deuterium content in Italian wines

The site-specific natural isotope fractionationnuclear magnetic resonance (SNIF-NMR)²H analysis is at present the reference method for determining the origin of ethanol and has been successfully applied for analysing all grape products. The method has also been used to identify the origin of wines and the aim of this study was to verify this application. In all, 3309 samples belonging to the Italian wines data bank were analysed from all 20 Italian regions to study the possibilities of determining and controlling the exact origin and year of the product. The dependency of the deuterium/hydrogen ratio of the methyl site (D/H_I) with latitude was confirmed but this was not the case for the D/H ratio of the methylene site (D/H_II) and the parameter R [2(D/H_II)/(D/H_I)] did not add any additional information. The frequency distribution of the NMR parameters follows a regular North-South gradient but they are not sufficiently different in each region to allow unique characterisation. The lack of effectiveness of the method, when applied to identification, depends on interannual and interregional variability. As a consequence, all but some very different regions overlap. The SNIF-NMR method is particularly suitable for detecting simple adulterations but, in the Italian situation, seems not to be so useful for solving problems of geographical origin. For this, it could be helpful to use other isotopic parameters and to ameliorate the sampling technique, to improve the effectiveness of the method.

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Regionale und jährliche Variabilität des Ethanolgebundenen Deuteriumgehaltes italienischer Weine

Zusammenfassung Die SNIF-NMR²H-Analytik wird derzeit als Referenzmethode zur Bestimmung der Herkunft des Ethanols bei Produkten aus Weintrauben erfolgreich angewandt. Die Methode wird auch zur Ermittlung der geographischen Herkunft von Wein eingesetzt. Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit war es, die Brauchbarkeit dieser Analysenmethode zur Bestimmung des geographischen Ursprungs italienischer Weine zu überprüfen. Dazu wurden Analysenergebnisse von 3309 Weinen aus allen 20 Weinbaugebieten Italiens im Rahmen einer Datenbank des D/H-Verhältnisses gesammelt. Während für die D/H_I-Werte eine deutliche Abhängigkeit von der geographischen Breite bestätigt werden konnte, zeigten die D/H_II-Werte keinen derartigen Zusammenhang. Auch der Parameter R erbrachte keine weiteren Informationen. Die Häufigkeits-Verteilung der NMR-Werte folgt deutlich einem Nord-Süd-Gradienten, aber sie sind nicht in jeder Region so unterschiedlich, daß eine signifikante Differenzierung möglich ist. Dies resultiert aus den jahrgangs- und gebietsabhängigen Schwankungen. Die SNIF-NMR Methode ist zur Aufklärung bestimmter Verfälschungen (Zuckerzusatz) gut geeignet, bei italienischen Weinen ist jedoch mit dieser Methode das Problem der Bestimmung der geographischen Herkunft nicht lösbar. Durch Messung weiterer stabiler Isotopen sowie durch eine Verbesserung der Probennahme kann eine Erhöhung der Effizienz zum Nachweis der geographischen Herkunft erzielt werden.

     

Influence of Fiber Orientation and Fillers on Low Velocity Impact Response of the Fabric Reinforced Epoxy Composites

The low velocity impact response of the epoxy composite materials, which were reinforced with various hybrid contents, such as plain pure or hybrid fabrics (carbon, aramid and glass fibers and copper wires) and filler mixtures into the epoxy matrix (aramid powder, potatoes starch, barium ferrite and carbon black) was investigated using a drop weight impact machine. The aim of this study was to characterize and assess the effects of fiber orientation at various angles and filler mixtures into epoxy matrix on the impact response. All the tests were carried out at constant impact energy, namely 90.629 J. Results indicated that the fiber orientation at various angles has a positive effect on impact response, mainly in the case of aramid fabric reinforced composites. In terms of influence of fillers addition into matrix, it was obtained an improvement on the impact response of hybrid fabric reinforced composite as compared to the pure fabric reinforced composites.

     

Hydrothermal temperature dependence of CaWO4 nanoparticles: structural,optical, morphology and photocatalytic activity

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - In this paper, CaWO4 nanoparticles were prepared by the hydrothermal method using the temperature of 100 (CaWO4-100), 120 (CaWO4-120), 140...     

Enhancing effect of Cl2 atmosphere on transition aluminas transformation

In the present study we examine the changes in phase composition and microstructure undergone by solids after thermal treatments performed on transition aluminas in chlorine and air atmospheres. The thermal transformation to the stable -Al2O3 was faster for the chlorine-heated samples than for the air-heated ones, and for chlorinated samples single crystals of -Al2O3 were observed. We propose a mechanism by which AlCl3(g) formation allowed vapour mass transport that contributed to the growth of crystals of -Al2O3. Hydroxyls contained in transition aluminas could enhance gaseous transport and could also react with chlorine molecules. The subsequent -Al2O3 crystallization would be assisted by water vapour.