Experimental investigation of the properties of electrospun nanofibers for potential medical application

Copyright © 2015 Anhui Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Polymer based nanofibers using ethylene-co-vinyl alcohol (EVOH) were fabricated by electrospinning technology. The nanofibers were studied for potential use as dressing materials for skin wounds treatment. Properties closely related to the clinical requirements for wound dressing were investigated, including the fluid uptake ability (FUA), the water vapour transmission rate (WVTR), the bacteria control ability of nanofibers encapsulated with different antibacterial drugs, and Ag of various concentrations. Nanofibre degradation under different environmental conditions was also studied for the prospect of long term usage. The finding confirms the potential of EVOH nanofibers for wound dressing application, including the superior performance compared to cotton gauze and the strong germ killing capacity when Ag particles are present in the nanofibers

Ant-colony-based multiuser detection for multifunctional-antenna-array-assisted MC DS-CDMA systems

A novel Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based Multi-User Detector (MUD) is designed for the synchronous Multi-Functional Antenna Array (MFAA) assisted Multi-Carrier Direct-Sequence Code-Division Multiple-Access (MC DS-CDMA) uplink (UL), which supports both receiver diversity and receiver beamforming. The ACO-based MUD aims for achieving a bit-error-rate (BER) performance approaching that of the optimum maximum likelihood (ML) MUD, without carrying out an exhaustive search of the entire MC DS-CDMA search space constituted by all possible combinations of the received multi-user vectors. We will demonstrate that regardless of the number of the subcarriers or of the MFAA configuration, the system employing the proposed ACO based MUD is capable of supporting 32 users with the aid of 31-chip Gold codes used as the T-domain spreading sequence without any significant performance degradation compared to the single-user system. As a further benefit, the number of floating point operations per second (FLOPS) imposed by the proposed ACO-based MUD is a factor of 108 lower than that of the ML MUD. We will also show that at a given increase of the complexity, the MFAA will allow the ACO based MUD to achieve a higher SNR gain than the Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) MC DS-CDMA system. Index Terms—Ant Colony Optimization, Multi-User Detector, Multi-Functional Antenna Array, Multi-Carrier Direct-Sequence Code-Division Multiple-Access, Uplink, Near-Maximum Likelihood Detection