Treatment of ocular allergies:nonpharmacologic, pharmacologic and immunotherapy

Ocular allergy is a significant and growing issue worldwide but for many patients, it is often not differentiated from systemic conditions, such as hay fever. Management of seasonal and perennial allergic conjunctivitis is often poor. Management is principally through avoidance measures (blocking or hygiene), nonpharmaceutical (such as artificial tears and cold compresses) and pharmaceutical (such as topical antihistamines and prophylactic mast cell stabilizers). Vernal and atopic keratoconjunctivitis are more severe and generally need treatment with NSAIDs, steroids and immunomodulators. Giant papillary conjunctivitis can be related to allergy but also is often contact lens related and in such cases can be managed by a period of abstinence and replacement of the lens or a change in lens material and/or design. Immunotherapy can be efficacious in severe, persistent cases of contact lens or allergic conjunctivitis

Wear protection of deep drawing tools by systematic optimization of highly stressed surfaces

The automotive sector is one of the largest energy consumers in Germany. Requests from politics and industry to significantly reduce emissions require new developments during utilization as well as during production phase. In line with the framework concept "InnoCaT", where more than 60 companies and research facilities from Germany take part, possibilities for producing companies are developed and analyzed to reduce the resource and energy consumption and by this reducing costs along the entire process chain of car body manufacturing. One approach to design car bodies lighter and more efficiently is to use aluminium and high strength steels. By this means weight and sheet thickness are reduced. However higher strengths of the steels and the adhesion affinity of aluminium significantly increase the requirements regarding the used tool steel. Thus grooves or galling appear more frequent at highly stressed surfaces. To assure high lifetimes and by this increase especially the resource efficiency concerning use of material and setting-up times within the press plant, a local optimization at the highly stressed surfaces is necessary. For this a FEM/BEM-tool for a time efficient and exact calculation of the occurring tool loads for complex die profiles is developed. Based on this development of load calculation a shape-optimization is performed at the corresponding areas. After the geometric optimization of the tool a local laser surface treatment for further wear protection is carried out using laser cladding or laser alloying/ -dispersing. By combining the technologies a highly wear resistant surface is achievable, which increases the tool's lifetime as well as the reproducibility within production