Cardiac dysrrhthmia in systemic disease

This is an ECG of a 6-year-old girl. She presented to us for management of epilepsy. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain showed multiple lesions consistent with cortical and subcortical tubers. There were also achromic spots on her skin and echocardiography demonstrated a rhabdomyoma near the right ventricular outflow tract. A diagnosis of tuberous sclerosis, an autosomal-dominantly inherited condition, was made. What is abnormal about the ECG?     

Characterization of arylamine N-acetyltransferase in Enterobacter aerogenes

N-acetyltransferase (NAT) activity was determined by incubation of purified Enterobacter aerogenes enzyme with 2-aminofluorene (2-AF) as the substrate, followed by high pressure liquid chromatography assays. The NAT activity from E. aerogenes was 0.58 +/- 0.08 nmol/min/mg protein for 2-AF. The values of apparent K(m) and Vmax were 0.72 +/- 0.14 mM and 2.45 +/- 0.29 nmol/min/mg protein, respectively, for 2-AF. The optimal pH value for the enzyme activity was 7.5 for the 2-AF tested. The optimal temperature for enzyme activity was 37 degrees C for the 2-AF substrate. The molecular weight of NAT from E. aerogenes was 44.9 kD. Among a series of divalent cations and salts, Zn2+, Ca2+, and Fe2+ were demonstrated to be the most potent protease inhibitors, and only ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid significantly protected the NAT. Iodoacetamide, in contrast to other agents, markedly inhibited NAT.     

Delaminations at the free edge of a composite laminate

The concept of a fracture process zone where damage takes place is used to analyse the delaminations at the free edges of angle ply laminates under uniaxial tension. The use of a fracture process zone removes the singularity in the interlaminar stresses and enables the initiation and growth of delaminations to be modelled for a perfect laminate without any assumed prior defects. Two different models for the stress displacement relationship in the fracture process zone are examined: a constant stress up to critical displacement and a linear relationship. Finite element analysis shows that there is little difference in the predictions obtained from the two models. An approximate analysis is presented for the constant stress stress-displacement model which is shown to agree with a finite element solution and experimental data. Hence it is argued that the approximate method using a constant stress model for the fracture process zone is sufficient for accurate prediction of delaminations.     

Positive state‐bounding observer for positive interval continuous‐time systems with time delay

This paper is concerned with the problem of positive observer synthesis for positive systems with both interval parameter uncertainties and time delay. Conventional observers may no longer be applicable for such kind of systems due to the positivity constraint on the observers, and they only provide an estimate of the system state in an asymptotic way. A pair of positive observers with state‐bounding feature is proposed to estimate the state of positive systems at all times in this paper. A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of desired observers is first established, and the observer matrices can be obtained easily through the solutions of a set of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Then, to reduce the error signal between the system state and its estimates, an iterative LMI algorithm is developed to compute the optimized state‐bounding observer matrices. Finally, a numerical example is presented to show the effectiveness and applicability of the theoretical results. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fast full‐color reflective display via photoluminescent enhancement

Reflective displays are advantageous in applications requiring low power or daylight readability. However, there are no low‐cost reflective technologies capable of displaying bright colors. By employing photoluminescence to more efficiently use ambient light, we created a prototype display that provides bright, full color in a simple, low‐cost architecture. This prototype includes a novel electrokinetic shutter, a layer that incorporates patterned luminescent red, green, and blue sub‐pixel elements, and a novel optical out‐coupling scheme. The luminescent elements convert otherwise‐wasted portions of the incident spectrum to light in the desired color band, resulting in improved color saturation and lightness. This prototype provides a color gamut that is superior to competing reflective display technologies that utilize color filters in single‐layer side‐by‐side sub‐pixel architectures. The current prototype is capable of switching in <0.5 s; future displays based on an alternative electro‐optic shutter technology should achieve video rate operation. A transflective version of this technology has also been prototyped. The transflective version utilizes its backlight with a power efficiency that is at least three times that of a conventional liquid crystal display. These photoluminescence‐based technologies enable a host of applications ranging from low‐power mobile products and retail pricing signage to daylight readable signage for outdoor advertising segments.     

Electrokinetically driven concentration of particles and cells by dielectrophoresis with DC-offset AC electric field

Insulator-based dielectrophoresis (iDEP) has been successfully used for on-chip manipulations of biological samples. Despite its effectiveness, iDEP typically requires high DC voltages to achieve sufficient electric field; this is mainly due to the coupled phenomena among linear electrokinetics: electroosmosis (EO) and electrophoresis (EP) and nonlinear electrokinetics: dielectrophoresis (DEP). This paper presents a microfluidic technique using DC-offset AC electric field for electrokinetic concentration of particles and cells by repulsive iDEP. This technique introduces AC electric field for producing iDEP which is decoupled from electroosmosis (EO) and electrophoresis (EP). The repulsive iDEP is generated in a PDMS tapered contraction channel that induces non-uniform electric field. The benefits of introducing AC electric field component are threefold: (i) it contributes to DEP force acting on particles, (ii) it suppresses EO flow and (iii) it does not cause any EP motion. As a result, the required DC field component that is mainly used to transport particles on the basis of EO and EP can be significantly reduced. Experimental results supported by numerical simulations showed that the total DC-offset AC electric field strength required to concentrate 15-μm particles is significantly reduced up to 85.9% as compared to using sole DC electric field. Parametric experimental studies showed that the higher buffer concentration, larger particle size and higher ratio of AC-to-DC electric field are favorable for particle concentration. In addition, the proposed technique was demonstrated for concentration of yeast cells.     

Non-existence of finite-time stable equilibria in fractional-order nonlinear systems

We note that in the literature it is often taken for granted that for fractional-order system without delays, whenever the system trajectory reaches the equilibrium, it will stay there. In fact, this is the well-known phenomenon of finite-time stability. However, in this paper, we will prove that for fractional-order nonlinear system described by Caputo’s or Riemann–Liouville’s definition, any equilibrium cannot be finite-time stable as long as the continuous solution corresponding to the initial value problem globally exists. In addition, some examples of stability analysis are revisited and linear Lyapunov function is used to prove the asymptotic stability of positive fractional-order nonlinear systems.     

A new result on the delay‐dependent stability of discrete systems with time‐varying delays

This paper proposes an improvement to the delay‐dependent stability of discrete systems with time‐varying delays. The approach is based on the observation that the positive definiteness of a chosen Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional does not necessarily require all the involved symmetric matrices to be positive definite, which has been overlooked in the literature. The derived delay‐dependent stability conditions are in terms of linear matrix inequalities. It is theoretically proved that our results are less conservative than the corresponding ones obtained by requiring the positive definiteness of all the symmetric matrices in a chosen Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional. The importance of the present approach is that a great number of delay‐dependent analysis and synthesis results obtained by the aforementioned requirement in the literature can be improved by the present approach without introducing any new decision variables. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Micro cam system driven by electrostatic comb-drive actuators based on SOI-MEMS technology

Microsystem Technologies - This paper reports a design and fabrication process of a micro cam system (MCS) with a flat-faced translating follower. The cam rim with cover diameter of 2.4&nbsp;mm...     

Pseudo‐predictor feedback control of discrete‐time linear systems with a single input delay

This paper studies the problems of stabilization of discrete‐time linear systems with a single input delay. By developing the methodology of pseudo‐predictor feedback, which uses the (artificial) closed‐loop system dynamics to predict the future state, memoryless state feedback control laws are constructed to solve the problem. Necessary and sufficient conditions are obtained to guarantee the stability of the closed‐loop system in terms of the stability of a class‐difference equations. It is also shown that the proposed controller achieves semi‐global stabilization of the system if its actuator is subject to either magnitude saturation or energy constraints under the condition that the open‐loop system is only polynomially unstable. Numerical examples have been worked out to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.