pHEMA: An Overview for Biomedical Applications

Poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) (pHEMA) as a biomaterial with excellent biocompatibility and cytocompatibility elicits a minimal immunological response from host tissue making it desirable for different biomedical applications. This article seeks to provide an in-depth overview of the properties and biomedical applications of pHEMA for bone tissue regeneration, wound healing, cancer therapy (stimuli and non-stimuli responsive systems), and ophthalmic applications (contact lenses and ocular drug delivery). As this polymer has been widely applied in ophthalmic applications, a specific consideration has been devoted to this field. Pure pHEMA does not possess antimicrobial properties and the site where the biomedical device is employed may be susceptible to microbial infections. Therefore, antimicrobial strategies such as the use of silver nanoparticles, antibiotics, and antimicrobial agents can be utilized to protect against infections. Therefore, the antimicrobial strategies besides the drug delivery applications of pHEMA were covered. With continuous research and advancement in science and technology, the outlook of pHEMA is promising as it will most certainly be utilized in more biomedical applications in the near future. The aim of this review was to bring together state-of-the-art research on pHEMA and their applications.     

Fundamental parameters affecting electrospinning of PAN nanofibers as uniaxially aligned fibers

Electrospinning with a collector consisting of two pieces of electrically conductive substrates separated by a gap has been used to prepare uniaxially aligned PAN nanofibers. Solution of 15 wt % of PAN/DMF was used tentatively for electrospinning. The effects of width of the gap and applied voltage on degree of alignment were investigated using image‐processing technique by Fourier power spectrum method. The electrospinning conditions that gave the best alignment of nanofibers for 10–15 wt % solution concentrations were experimentally obtained. Bundles like multifilament yarns of uniaxially aligned nanofibers were prepared using a new simple method. After‐treatments of these bundles were carried out in boiling water under tension. A comparison was made between the crystallinity and mechanical behavior of posttreated and untreated bundles. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 101: 4350–4357, 2006     

纳米碳酸钙的制备及表征

研究了以氧化钙和二氧化碳为原料,化学法制备纳米碳酸钙的工艺条件、添加剂的影响及形态。结果表明:中间体氢氧化钙的初始浓度、二氧化碳的流量、反应温度、搅拌速度及添加剂等在控制制备纳米碳酸钙颗粒的形状和尺寸中均十分重要。透射电镜观察结果表明:通过控制反应及添加剂,可以得到尺寸规整的链锁形、纺锤形和球形纳米碳酸钙。表面能谱证实产品为高纯的碳酸钙。X射线衍射和电子衍射的结果进一步表明:所制纳米碳酸钙均属方解石型六方晶系,a0=0.498 9 nm,c0=1.706 2 nm;为多晶结构。     

A Multi-Criteria Group Decision Making Methodology Using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Sets: Application to Water Resources Management

In this paper, a new fuzzy group decision-making methodology which determines and incorporates negotiation powers of decision makers is developed. The proposed method is based on a combination of interval type-2 fuzzy sets and a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) model, namely TOPSIS. To examine the applicability of the proposed methodology, it is used for finding the best scenario of allocating water and reclaimed wastewater to domestic, agricultural, and industrial water sectors and restoring groundwater quantity and quality in the Varamin region located in Tehran metropolitan area in Iran. The results show that the selected scenario leads to an acceptable groundwater conservation level during a long-term planning horizon. Although the capital cost of this scenario is high, which leads to groundwater restoration during the 34-year planning horizon, it is determined as the best allocation scenario. This scenario also entails the second least pumping cost, due to less water allocation from the groundwater. To evaluate the results of the proposed methodology, they are compared with those obtained using some well-known interval type-2 decision-making approaches including arithmetic-based, TOPSIS-based, and likelihood-based comparison methods. The Spearman correlation coefficient shows that the obtained results generally concur with those of the other methods. It is also concluded that the proposed methodology gives more reasonable results by calculating and considering the negotiation powers of decision makers in an extended TOPSIS-based group decision-making model.

     

Fast implementation of dense stereo vision algorithms on a highly parallel SIMD architecture

In this paper, we present faster than real-time implementation of a class of dense stereo vision algorithms on a low-power massively parallel SIMD architecture, the CSX700. With two cores, each with 96 Processing Elements, this SIMD architecture provides a peak computation power of 96 GFLOPS while consuming only 9 Watts, making it an excellent candidate for embedded computing applications. Exploiting full features of this architecture, we have developed schemes for an efficient parallel implementation with minimum of overhead. For the sum of squared differences (SSD) algorithm and for VGA (640 × 480) images with disparity ranges of 16 and 32, we achieve a performance of 179 and 94 frames per second (fps), respectively. For the HDTV (1,280 × 720) images with disparity ranges of 16 and 32, we achieve a performance of 67 and 35 fps, respectively. We have also implemented more accurate, and hence more computationally expensive variants of the SSD, and for most cases, particularly for VGA images, we have achieved faster than real-time performance. Our results clearly demonstrate that, by developing careful parallelization schemes, the CSX architecture can provide excellent performance and flexibility for various embedded vision applications.     

Free vibration analysis of double-viscoelastic nano-composite micro-plates reinforced by FG-SWCNTs based on the third-order shear deformation theory

Microsystem Technologies - In this paper, free vibration analysis of a double viscoelastic nano-composite plate system reinforced by functionally graded single-walled carbon nanotubes (FG-SWCNT)...     

Agent-based time delay margin in consensus of multi-agent systems by an event-triggered control method: Concept and computation

This paper deals with defining the concept of agent-based time delay margin and computing its value in multi-agent systems controlled by event-triggered based controllers. The agent-based time delay margin specifying the time delay tolerance of each agent for ensuring consensus in event-triggered controlled multi-agent systems can be considered as complementary for the concept of (network) time delay margin, which has been previously introduced in some literature. In this paper, an event-triggered control method for achieving consensus in multi-agent systems with time delay is considered. It is shown that the Zeno behavior is excluded by applying this method. Then, in a multi-agent system controlled by the considered event-triggered method, the concept of agent-based time delay margin in the presence of a fixed network delay is defined. Moreover, an algorithm for computing the value of the time delay margin for each agent is proposed. Numerical simulation results are also provided to verify the obtained theoretical results.     

Adaptive robust control of uncertain systems with state and input delay

In this paper, adaptive robust control of uncertain systems with multiple time delays in states and input is considered. It is assumed that the parameter uncertainties are time varying norm-bounded whose bounds are unknown but their functional properties are known. To overcome the effect of input delay on the closed loop system stability, new Lyapunov Krasovskii functional will be introduced. It is shown that the proposed adaptive robust controller guarantees globally uniformly exponentially convergence of all system solutions to a ball with any certain convergence rate. Moreover, if there is no disturbance in the system, asymptotic stability of the closed loop system will be established. The proposed design condition is formulated in terms of linear matrix inequality (LMI) which can be easily solved by LMI Toolbox in Matlab. Finally, an illustrative example is included to show the effectiveness of results developed in this paper.     

Design, fabrication and control of a magnetic capsule-robot for the human esophagus

Much research on the development of a robotic capsule and micro robot for the diagnosis of gastrointestinal diseases has been carried out. The powering of these micro systems is becoming very challenging as the implementation of such systems is limited due to the existence of on-board power supplies. This paper presents a micro robotic system based on magnetic principles. The goal is to build a system in which a capsule-robot can be manipulated wirelessly inside an enclosed environment such as human??s body. A prototype of capsule-robot is built and tested, that can be remotely operated with three DOF in an enclosed environment by transferring magnetic energy and electromagnetic waves. A magnetic drive unit generates magnetic energy for the manipulation. Experimental results show the capsule-robot is manipulated and moved through a desired trajectory in a viscous fluid. The capsule-robot can be potentially used for endoscopy and colonoscopy.