• Pluronic F127 thermosensitive injectable smart hydrogels for controlled drug delivery system development

  Shriky, Banah; Kelly, Adrian L.; Isreb, Mohammad; Babenko, Maksims; Mahmoudi, N.; Rogers, S.; Shebanova, O.; Snow, T.; Gough, Timothy D. (2020-04-01)

  Understanding structure-property relationships is critical for the development of new drug delivery systems. This study investigates the properties of Pluronic smart hydrogel formulations for future use as injectable controlled drug carriers. The smart hydrogels promise to enhance patient compliance, decrease side effects and reduce dose and frequency. Pharmaceutically, these systems are attractive due to their unique sol-gel phase transition in the body, biocompatibility, safety and injectability as solutions before transforming into gel matrices at body temperature. We quantify the structural changes of F127 systems under controlled temperature after flow, as experienced during real bodily injection. Empirical formulae combining the coupled thermal and shear dependency are produced to aid future application of these systems. Induced structural transitions measured in-situ by small angle x-ray and neutron scattering reveal mixed oriented structures that can be exploited to tailor the drug release profile.
• An approximation to the PTT viscoelastic model for Gas Assisted Injection Moulding simulation

  Olley, Peter (2020)

  An approximation to the Phan-Thien Tanner (PTT) constitutive model is developed with the aim of giving low-cost simulation of Gas Assisted Injection Moulding (GAIM) while incorporating important viscoelastic characteristics. It is shown that the developed model gives a response typical of full viscoelastic models in transient and steady state uniaxial and constant shear rate deformations. The model is incorporated into a 3D finite element GAIM simulation which uses the ‘pseudo-concentration’ method to predict residual polymer, and applied to published experimental results for a Boger fluid and a shear-thinning polystyrene melt. It is shown that the simulation gives a very good match to published results for the Boger fluid which show increasing Residual Wall Thickness (RWT) with increasing Deborah number. Against the shear-thinning polymer, the quality of match depends upon which of two ‘plausible’ relaxation times is chosen; qualitatively different results arise from two different means of estimating a single relaxation time. A ‘multi-mode’ approach is developed to avoid this uncertainty. It is shown that the multi-mode approach gives decreasing RWT with increasing Deborah number in agreement with the published experimental results, and avoids the issues that arise from estimating a single relaxation time for a molten polymer.
• Peace, War and Gender in the Modern Era

  Pankhurst, Donna T. (2019-03-19)

  The practices and conceptions of peace and war have been highly gendered throughout world history. Indeed, the defining of genders has often itself been rooted in ideas and experiences of war and violence, with men as warriors, and women as the embodiment of peace. It is certainly the case that throughout human history the majority of war combatants have been men. By contrast many women have used their gendered identities, as mothers and guardians of life, in their activism in global peace movements, and in peacemaking at very local levels all over the globe. These gendered experiences of women and men have resonance everywhere in the world, but are also stereotypes. As well as being warriors and the bearers of violence, men have also resisted dominant social pressures to fight, and been active in movements to build peace. Women have also cajoled men, and socialised boys, to fight, and shamed those who did not. Thus, whereas a focus on the stereotypes suggests that the differences between women and men are due to their violent or peaceful natures, paying attention to the full range of behaviour of women and men makes it self-evident that these differences cannot be explained by biological differences alone, because they are so varied. Nonetheless, the roles played by women and men that go beyond the simple stereotypes are persistently regarded as transgressive or insignificant in many cultures, making it difficult to keep the broader picture in mind. That is not to say that gender differences are not significant however; gender remains one of the most important lenses through which to understand war and peace.
• An ontological approach for pathology assessment and diagnosis of tunnels

  Dimitrova, V.; Mehmood, M.O.; Thakker, Dhaval; Sage-Vallier, B.; Valdes, J.; Cohn, A.G. (ELSEVIER, 2020-04)

  Tunnel maintenance requires complex decision making, which involves pathology diagnosis and risk assessment, to ensure full safety while optimising maintenance and repair costs. A Decision Support System (DSS) can play a key role in this process by supporting the decision makers in identifying pathologies based on disorders present in various tunnel portions and contextual factors affecting a tunnel. Another key aspect is to identify which spatial stretches within a tunnel contain pathologies of similar kinds within neighbouring tunnel segments. This paper presents PADTUN, a novel intelligent decision support system that assists with pathology diagnosis and assessment of tunnels with respect to their disorders and diagnosis influencing factors. It utilises semantic web technologies for knowledge capture, representation, and reasoning. The core of PADTUN is a family of ontologies which represent the main concepts and relations associated with pathology assessment, and capture the decision process concerning tunnel maintenance. Tunnel inspection data is linked to these ontologies to take advantage of inference capabilities offered by semantic technologies. In addition, an intelligent mechanism is presented which exploits abstraction and inference capabilities. Thus PADTUN provides the world’s first semantically based intelligent DSS for tunnel maintenance. PADTUN was developed by an interdisciplinary team of tunnel experts and knowledge engineers in real-world settings offered by the NeTTUN EU Project. An evaluation of the PADTUN system is performed using real-world tunnel data and diagnosis tasks. We show how the use of semantic technologies allows addressing the complex issues of tunnel pathology inferencing, aiding in, and matching transportation experts’ expectations of decision support. The methodology is applicable to any linear transport structures, offering intelligent ways to aid with complex decision processes related to diagnosis and maintenance.
• How reproducible is the acoustical characterization of porous media?

  Pompoli, F.; Bonfiglio, P.; Horoshenkov, K.V.; Khan, Amir; Jaouen, L.; Bécot, F-X.; Sgard, F.; Asdrubali, F.; D'Alessandro, F.; Hübelt, J.; et al. (2017-02)

  There is a considerable number of research publications on the characterization of porous media that is carried out in accordance with ISO 10534-2 (International Standards Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, 2001) and/or ISO 9053 (International Standards Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, 1991). According to the Web of Science(TM) (last accessed 22 September 2016) there were 339 publications in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America alone which deal with the acoustics of porous media. However, the reproducibility of these characterization procedures is not well understood. This paper deals with the reproducibility of some standard characterization procedures for acoustic porous materials. The paper is an extension of the work published by Horoshenkov, Khan, Bécot, Jaouen, Sgard, Renault, Amirouche, Pompoli, Prodi, Bonfiglio, Pispola, Asdrubali, Hübelt, Atalla, Amédin, Lauriks, and Boeckx [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 122(1), 345-353 (2007)]. In this paper, independent laboratory measurements were performed on the same material specimens so that the naturally occurring inhomogeneity in materials was controlled. It also presented the reproducibility data for the characteristic impedance, complex wavenumber, and for some related pore structure properties. This work can be helpful to better understand the tolerances of these material characterization procedures so improvements can be developed to reduce experimental errors and improve the reproducibility between laboratories.

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