An axisymmetric bioheat transfer analysis through a unified model

A unified model is developed for the analysis of heat transfer (radiation and non-Fourier conduction) in an axisymmetric participating medium. The proposed model includes three different variants of hyperbolic–parabolic heat conduction models, that is, the single phase lag model, dual phase lag model, and the Fourier (no phase lag) model. The radiating-conducting medium is radiatively absorbing, emitting, and isotropically scattering. Significance of all the above mentioned models on the heat transfer characteristics is investigated in a two-dimensional axisymmetric geometry. The equation of transfer and the coupled non-Fourier conduction-radiation equation are solved via finite volume method. A fully implicit scheme is used to resolve the transient terms in the energy equation. For spatial resolution of radiation information, the STEP scheme is applied. Tri-diagonal-matrix-algorithm is used to solve the resulting set of linear discrete equations. Effects of two important influencing parameters: the scattering albedo and the radiation- conduction parameter are studied on the temporal evolution of temperature field in the radiatively participating medium. The non-Fourier effect of heat transport captured well with the proposed unified model. A good agreement can be found between the proposed model predictions and those available in the literature. It is also found that when the phase lag of the temperature gradient and the heat flux are the same, it reduces to conventional Fourier conduction-radiation and the wave behavior diminishes. However, the reduction to this Fourier model fails in the presence of constant blood perfusion and metabolic heat generation.     

Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles: Drug Delivery Vehicles for Antidiabetic Molecules

Mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) are promising nanomaterials that are widely used in biomedical applications like drug delivery, diagnosis, bio-sensing and cell tracking. MSNs have been investigated meticulously in the drug-delivery field due to their unique chemical and pharmacokinetic properties, such as highly ordered mesopores, high surface area and pore volume, tuneable pore size, stability, surface functionalisation, and biocompatibility. MSN-based nanocomposites have been used to deliver therapeutic molecules like insulin, GLP-1, exenatide, DPP-4 inhibitor and plasmid-containing GLP-1 genes for managing diabetes mellitus for the last decade. The functionalisation properties of MSNs make them substantially capable of the co-delivery, controlled delivery and stimuli-responsive delivery of antidiabetic drugs. This review focuses on the delivery of antidiabetic therapeutics with special emphasis on the functionalisation of MSNs and stimuli-responsive delivery.     

Stimuli–Responsive Mechanoadaptive Elastomeric Composite Materials: Challenges,Opportunities, and New Approaches

Stimuli–responsive mechanoadaptive materials, capable of reversibly changing their mechanical properties when exposed to an external stimulus, are the next generation of smart materials with immense transformative potential for various technological applications. Although the concept of adaptive mechanical properties has been proven for some materials, it remains very challenging for soft elastomeric materials. The aim of this review is to provide new ideas and strategies for the development of mechanoadaptive elastomeric composites using commercial rubber as the matrix polymer. The fundamental question addressed here is as follows: How do the phase-responsive functional fillers alter the mechanical properties? For a given physical network environment, what is the mechanism that gives rise to the stimuli–responsive properties of the resulting composites? Herein, the preparation, structure, and properties of recently developed mechanoadaptive elastomeric materials are summarized. Furthermore, based on their structure–property relationships, plausible applications of these smart materials in various technology-specific applications such as soft robotics, actuators, sensors, smart tires, automotive design, aerospace, etc. are demonstrated with representative examples. Finally, the article critically discusses the existing challenges in the field of mechanoadaptive elastomers in order to provide valuable insights in this area.     

Accelerating earthquake simulations on general‐purpose graphics processors

Parallelization strategies are presented for Virtual Quake, a numerical simulation code for earthquakes based on topologically realistic systems of interacting earthquake faults. One of the demands placed upon the simulation is the accurate reproduction of the observed earthquake statistics over three to four decades. This requires the use of a high‐resolution fault model in computations, which demands computational power that is well beyond the scope of off‐the‐shelf multi‐core CPU computers. However, the recent advances in general‐purpose graphic processing units have the potential to address this problem at moderate cost increments. A functional decomposition of Virtual Quake is performed, and opportunities for parallelization are discussed in this work. Computationally intensive modules are identified, and these are implemented on graphics processing units, significantly speeding up earthquake simulations. In the current best case scenario, a computer with six graphics processing units can simulate 500 years of fault activity in California at 1.5 km × 1.5 km element resolution in less than 1 hour, whereas a single CPU requires more than 2 days to perform the same simulation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Transformation of Contact‐Explosives Primary Amines and Iodine(III) into a Successful Chemical Reaction under Solvent‐Free Ball Milling Conditions

Any synthetic transformation using contact‐explosives primary amines and hypervalent iodine(III) (phenyliodine diacetate) in constrained media (extreme conditions) is practically impossible. Herein, we report a method of controlling the explosion into a successful chemical reaction using the acid‐salt NaHSO₄. As a proof‐of‐concept, we considered mechanochemical (ball‐milling) cross dehydrogenative coupling (CDC) reaction for the amidation of aldehydes via C H activation. An isothermal titration calorimetric (ITC) study was helpful to understand the enthalpy changes during the reactions before and after addition of NaHSO₄.