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Browsing Research Centers by Department "Mechanical Engineering"
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- 3D printing vending machine(United States Patent and Trademark Office, 2016-08-16)A vending machine for creating a three-dimensional object having an enclosure having an exterior and interior. The interior receives and houses at least one three-dimensional printer. An interface for accepting an instruction associated with an object to be printed and transmitting the instruction to the printer. A storage section for storing a printed object that provides access to the printed part but limits or prohibits access to the interior.
- Double helical conformation and extreme rigidity in a rodlike polyelectrolyteWang, Ying; He, Yadong; Yu, Zhou; Gao, Jianwei; ten Brinck, Stephanie; Slebodnick, Carla; Fahs, Gregory B.; Zanelotti, Curt J.; Hegde, Maruti; Moore, Robert Bowen; Ensing, Bernd; Dingemans, Theo J.; Qiao, Rui; Madsen, Louis A. (Nature Publishing Group, 2019-02-18)The ubiquitous biomacromolecule DNA has an axial rigidity persistence length of ~50 nm, driven by its elegant double helical structure. While double and multiple helix structures appear widely in nature, only rarely are these found in synthetic non-chiral macromolecules. Here we report a double helical conformation in the densely charged aromatic polyamide poly(2,2′-disulfonyl-4,4′-benzidine terephthalamide) or PBDT. This double helix macromolecule represents one of the most rigid simple molecular structures known, exhibiting an extremely high axial persistence length (~1 micrometer). We present X-ray diffraction, NMR spectroscopy, and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations that reveal and confirm the double helical conformation. The discovery of this extreme rigidity in combination with high charge density gives insight into the self-assembly of molecular ionic composites with high mechanical modulus (~ 1 GPa) yet with liquid-like ion motions inside, and provides fodder for formation of other 1D-reinforced composites. © 2019, The Author(s).
- Nanoscale Bacteria‐Enabled Autonomous Drug Delivery System (NanoBEADS) Enhances Intratumoral Transport of NanomedicineSuh, SeungBeum; Jo, Ami; Traore, Mahama Aziz; Zhan, Ying; Coutermarsh-Ott, Sheryl; Ringel-Scaia, Veronica M.; Allen, Irving C.; Davis, Richey M.; Behkam, Bahareh (Wiley, 2018-12-05)Cancer drug delivery remains a formidable challenge due to systemic toxicity and inadequate extravascular transport of nanotherapeutics to cells distal from blood vessels. It is hypothesized that, in absence of an external driving force, the Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium could be exploited for autonomous targeted delivery of nanotherapeutics to currently unreachable sites. To test the hypothesis, a nanoscale bacteria‐enabled autonomous drug delivery system (NanoBEADS) is developed in which the functional capabilities of the tumor‐targeting S. Typhimurium VNP20009 are interfaced with poly(lactic‐co‐glycolic acid) nanoparticles. The impact of nanoparticle conjugation is evaluated on NanoBEADS' invasion of cancer cells and intratumoral transport in 3D tumor spheroids in vitro, and biodistribution in a mammary tumor model in vivo. It is found that intercellular (between cells) self‐replication and translocation are the dominant mechanisms of bacteria intratumoral penetration and that nanoparticle conjugation does not impede bacteria's intratumoral transport performance. Through the development of new transport metrics, it is demonstrated that NanoBEADS enhance nanoparticle retention and distribution in solid tumors by up to a remarkable 100‐fold without requiring any externally applied driving force or control input. Such autonomous biohybrid systems could unlock a powerful new paradigm in cancer treatment by improving the therapeutic index of chemotherapeutic drugs and minimizing systemic side effects.
- A new wavelet family based on second-order LTI-systemsAbuhamdia, Tariq; Taheri, Saied; Burns, John A. (SAGE, 2016)In this paper, a new family of wavelets derived from the underdamped response of second-order Linear-Time-Invariant (LTI) systems is introduced. The most important criteria for a function or signal to be a wavelet is the ability to recover the original signal back from its continuous wavelet transform. We show that it is possible to recover back the original signal once the Second-Order Underdamped LTI (SOULTI) wavelet is applied to decompose the signal. It is found that the SOULTI wavelet transform of a signal satisfies a linear differential equation called the reconstructing differential equation, which is closely related to the differential equation that produces the wavelet. Moreover, a time-frequency resolution is defined based on two different approaches. The new transform has useful properties; a direct relation between the scale and the frequency, unique transform formulas that can be easily obtained for most elementary signals such as unit step, sinusoids, polynomials, and decaying harmonic signals, and linear relations between the wavelet transform of signals and the wavelet transform of their derivatives and integrals. The results obtained are presented with analytical and numerical examples. Signals with constant harmonics and signals with time-varying frequencies are analyzed, and their evolutionary spectrum is obtained. Contour mapping of the transform in the time-scale and the time-frequency domains clearly detects the change of the frequency content of the analyzed signals with respect to time. The results are compared with other wavelets results and with the short-time fourier analysis spectrograms. At the end, we propose the method of reverse wavelet transform to mitigate the edge effect.