Porous calcium phosphate ceramics prepared by coating polyurethane foams with calcium phosphate cements

Porous calcium phosphates have important biomedical applications such as bone defect fillers, tissue engineering scaffolds, and drug delivery systems. While a number of methods to produce the porous calcium phosphate ceramics have been reported, this study aimed to develop a new fabrication method. The new method involved the use of polyurethane foams to produce highly porous calcium phosphate cements (CPCs). By firing the porous CPCs at 1200 degrees Celsius, the polyurethane foams were burnt off and the CPCs prepared at room temperature were converted into sintered porous hydroxyapatite-based calcium phosphate ceramics. The sintered porous calcium phosphate ceramics could then be coated with a layer of the CPC at room temperature, resulting in high porosity, high pore interconnectivity, and controlled pores size

Preparation and characterization of interpenetrating phased TCP/HA/PLGA composites

The purpose of this study was to fabricate composites consisting of three interpenetrating networks: tricalcium phosphate (TCP), hydroxyapatite (HA), and poly(DL-lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA). The porous TCP network was first produced by coating a polyurethane (PU) foam with hydrolysable alpha-TCP slurry. The HA network was derived from a calcium phosphate cement (CPC) filled in the porous TCP network. The remaining open pore network in the HA/TCP composite was further infiltrated with a PLGA network. The three sets of spatially continuous networks would have different biodegradation rates and thus bone tissue would grow towards the fastest biodegrading network while the remaining networks still maintaining their geometrical shape and carrying the physiological load for the tissue ingrowth

Deep learning based prediction on greenhouse crop yield combined TCN and RNN

Funding: This research was supported as part of SMARTGREEN, an Interreg project supported by the North Sea Programme of the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Dirac operator on untrapped surfaces

We establish a sharp extrinsic lower bound for the first eigenvalue of the Dirac operator of an untrapped surface in initial data sets without apparent horizon in terms of the norm of its mean curvature vector. The equality case leads to rigidity results for the constraint equations with spherical boundary as well as uniqueness results for constant mean curvature surfaces in Minkowski space.Comment: 16 page

Tracking Ionic Rearrangements and Interpreting Dynamic Volumetric Changes in Two-Dimensional Metal Carbide Supercapacitors: A Molecular Dynamics Simulation Study

We present a molecular dynamics simulation study achieved on two‐dimensional (2D) Ti3C2Tx MXenes in the ionic liquid 1‐ethyl‐3‐methylimidazolium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide ([EMIM]+[TFSI]−) electrolyte. Our simulations reproduce the different patterns of volumetric change observed experimentally for both the negative and positive electrodes. The analysis of ionic fluxes and structure rearrangements in the 2D material provide an atomic scale insight into the charge and discharge processes in the layer pore and confirm the existence of two different charge‐storage mechanisms at the negative and positive electrodes. The ionic number variation and the structure rearrangement contribute to the dynamic volumetric changes of both electrodes: negative electrode expansion and positive electrode contraction

On the positive mass theorem for manifolds with corners

We study the positive mass theorem for certain non-smooth metrics following P. Miao's work. Our approach is to smooth the metric using the Ricci flow. As well as improving some previous results on the behaviour of the ADM mass under the Ricci flow, we extend the analysis of the zero mass case to higher dimensions.Comment: 21 pages, incorporated referee's comment