An Umbrella-Shaped Topology for Broadband MEMS Piezoelectric Vibration Energy Harvesting

While cantilever topologies offer high power responsiveness for MEMS vibration energy harvesting (VEH), they are less robust than multiply clamped or membrane topologies. This paper attempts to address this topological optimisation dilemma by attempting to achieve both high power density and robustness. The proposed umbrella-shaped topology constituents of a single central anchor while the membrane area extends outwards and is further enclosed by a ring of proof mass. Implemented on a 0.5 μm AlN on 10 μm doped Si process, a fabricated device (121 mm2 die area) recorded a peak power of 173 μW (1798 Hz and 0.56 g). The normalised power density compares favourably against the state-of-the-art cantilever piezoelectric MEMS VEH, while not sacrificing robustness. Furthermore, this device offers a broadband response, and it has experimentally demonstrated over 3 times higher band-limited noise induced power density than a cantilevered harvester fabricated using the same process

Probing nonlocal effects in metals with graphene plasmons

In this paper we analyze the effects of nonlocality on the optical properties of a system consisting of a thin metallic film separated from a graphene sheet by a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) layer. We show that nonlocal effects in the metal have a strong impact on the spectrum of the surface plasmon-polaritons on graphene. If the graphene sheet is shaped into a grating, we show that the extinction curves can be used to shed light on the importance of nonlocal effects in metals. Therefore, graphene surface plasmons emerge as a tool for probing nonlocal effects in metallic nanostructures, including thin metallic films. As a byproduct of our study, we show that nonlocal effects lead to smaller losses for the graphene plasmons than what is predicted by a local calculation. We show that these effects can be very well mimicked using a local theory with an effective spacer thickness larger than its actual value.The authors thank Sébastien Nanot and Itai Epstein for valuable discussions and comments. E.J.C.D., Yu.V.B. and N.M.R.P. acknowledge support from the European Commission through the project GrapheneDriven Revolutions in ICT and Beyond (Ref. No. 785219), and from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in the framework of the Strategic Financing UID/FIS/04650/2013. E.J.C.D. acknowledges FCT for the grant CFUM-BI-14/2016. D.A.I. acknowledges the FPI grant BES-2014-068504. F.H.L.K. acknowledges financial support from the Government of Catalonia trough the SGR grant (2014-SGR-1535), and from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2015-0522), support by Fundacio Cellex Barcelona, CERCA Programme / Generalitat de Catalunya and the Mineco grants Ramn y Cajal (RYC-2012-12281) and Plan Nacional (FIS201347161-P and FIS2014-59639-JIN). Furthermore, the research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement no.696656 Graphene Flagship, the ERC starting grant (307806, CarbonLight), and project GRASP (FP7-ICT-2013-613024-GRASP). N. A. M. is a VILLUM Investigator supported by VILLUM FONDEN (grant No. 16498). Center for Nano Optics is financially supported by the University of Southern Denmark (SDU 2020 funding). Center for Nanostructured Graphene is supported by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF103).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Antineutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibodies in uveitis

Antineutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibodies were detected in patients with some autoimmune and vascular disease such as Wegner’s granulomatosis polyarthritis nodosa and systemic lupus erythematosus. Indirect immunofluorescence technique was employed to detect these autoantibodies. By this method, two general patterns of antineutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibodies were seen: a cytoplasmic (C-ANCA) and a perinuclear form (P-ANCA). These antibodies also were observed in uveitis. In this study the presence of antineutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibodies in 25 patients with uveitis and its relationship with uveitis and its relationship with anatomical location of the disease is evaluated. According to the results antineutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibodies was detected in 16% (4 out of 25) of the patients all of them being C-ANCA type. The results also showed that there was not any significant correlation between the presence of antineutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibodies and anatomical location of the disease (P=0.65)

Video classification using deep autoencoder network

Abstract We present a deep learning framework for video classification applicable to face recognition and dynamic texture recognition. A Deep Autoencoder Network Template (DANT) is designed whose weights are initialized by conducting unsupervised pre-training in a layer-wise fashion using Gaussian Restricted Boltzmann Machines. In order to obtain a class specific network and fine tune the weights for each class, the pre-initialized DANT is trained for each class of video sequences, separately. A majority voting technique based on the reconstruction error is employed for the classification task. The extensive evaluation and comparisons with state-of-the-art approaches on Honda/UCSD, DynTex, and YUPPEN databases demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the performance of dynamic texture classification

The Effect of Different Severities of Diet Dilution and Using a Supplemental Enzyme on Performance of Broiler Chickens

In this study the effect of diet dilution in 16-20 d of age and using a multi-enzyme (Endofeed-W) on performance, carcass characteristics and some blood parameters of broiler chickens (Cobb 500, commercial strain) was studied. This experiment was conducted as a factorial arrangement 2×3 in a completely randomized design with 3 replicates and 8 chicks in each replicate. Experimental diets contained 0, 20 and 40 percent rice hulls and 2 levels of enzyme (0, 500 mg/Kg). These diets contained 3000, 2400, 1800 Kcal/Kg metabolizable energy, and 21, 16.8 and 12.6 % crude protein, respectively. In other days of experiment, the chicks were fed in according to Cobb 500 rearing guideline. During feed restriction and whole period of rearing (1-44d), diet diluting up to 20% decreased feed conversion ratio (

The Effect of Different Levels of Crude Protein and Threonine on Performance and Immune system of Broiler Chickens during Starter and Grower Periods

This experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of different levels of crude protein and threonine on performance, carcass characteristics and immune system of broiler chickens during starter (7-24) and grower (25-42) periods. A total of 288 male broiler chicks of Ross 308 strain were used in a completely randomized design with factorial arrangement (2×4) with three replicates in each treatment. Experimental diets were included two levels of protein (Ross 308 guideline recommendation and 5% lower than the recommendation) and four levels of threonine (90, 100, 110, 120 of NRC recommendation). At starter period, threonine levels had a significant effect on feed conversion ratio (

Production And Partial Purification Of IL-2 Cells From Jurcat Cell Line Culture

Background: Role of cytokines in regulation of immune system has been the subject of studies and clinical investigations. One of these cytokines, IL-2 has been well initially introduced as T cell Growth factor (TCGF), but subsequently it appeared that IL-2 is one of the important mediators affecting growth, development and activity of T, B, NK and LAK cells. Nowadays this cytokines has extensive use in clinical and research fields of immunotherapy of cancer and infectious disease. Materials and Methods: In this study, we used Jurcat cell line for production and partial purification of IL-2 106 cell/ml were stimulated by PHA (1 µg/ml) and PMA (10 µg/ml) at the third day of the culture and then supernatant were collected after 22 hrs. Results & Conclusion: In order to obtain sufficient amount of IL-2 and eliminate interfacing materials, supernatants were concentrated using Amicon 10 and 30 PM filters. After concentrating, bioassay and Elisa were performed to detect the biological activity and amount of produced IL-2. Reversed phase-HPLC was used to confirm the IL-2 identity and purification