Digital Twins Approach for Sustainable Industry

Sustainable industry is a part of The European Green Deal, which aims to achieve the EU’s climate and environmental goals based on the circular economy. Digital twins are important technologies for realizing industry 4.0 and related sectors. In this paper, we looked at building the DTs for manufacturing, healthcare and construction industrial sectors in Industry 4.0 architecture to realize a sustainable industry

Fame and future of faecal transplantations - developing next-generation therapies with synthetic microbiomes

Peer reviewe

Double Dielectric Barrier (DBD) plasma-assisted deposition of chemical stabilized nanoparticles on polyamide 6,6 and polyester fabrics

The development of new multifunctional textiles containing nanoparticles (NPs) has had a special interest in several applications for pharmaceutical, medical, engineering, agricultural, and food products.[1-2] Cu, Zn and especially Ag NPs exhibit strong antibacterial activities on a broad spectrum of bacteria.[3-5] Most of the antimicrobial textiles coated with NPs are not able to perform a controlled release of the antibiotic species. Thus, the immobilization of NPs in the substrate or its inclusion in polymeric matrix is essential to control the NPs antibiotic effect with time. Dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma technology is one of the most effective non-thermal plasma sources.[6] However, an even dispersion and coating of NPs onto fabrics remain a challenge due to the high degree of aggregation of metal NPs.[7] Some capping agents were described to increase the suspension stability such as citrate and SDS.[8] In this work, Ag, Zn, and Cu NPs deposition on DBD plasma pre-treated polyamide 6,6 (PA66) and polyester (PES) were tested for the production of durable antibacterial textiles. SEM-EDX analysis and the effect of some NPs stabilizers (e.g. sodium citrate, sodium alginate and Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)) was analysed by dynamic light scattering (DLS) in term of size, polydispersity index and zeta potential. XPS analyses prove the DBD efficacy in providing oxygen species onto the fabric’s surfaces. The SEM analyses prove the deposition of the Ag and Cu NPs onto the PES and PA66 fabrics. No zinc was detected. However, antimicrobial tests in PES shows that all the NPs have an antimicrobial effect but Cu and Zn show activity only in S. aureus and Ag only in E.coli. Cu shows a reasonable dispersion onto the fibres but PVP coated AgNPs display a high level of aggregation even after 1 hour of ultrasonic treatment. To solve instability and aggregation problems, NPs suspensions were prepared in different concentrations (1, 2.5 and 5 wt%) of citrate, alginate and PVA using water and ethanol as control by ultrasonic bath. In table 1 are resumed the best results obtained for each NP compared to water as control. Ethanol and PVA were disregarded due to the highest instability and lowest ζ potential, respectively. XPS, SEM and antimicrobial data shows lack in coating uniformity. It is clear that doesn't exist a univocal dispersant and concentration for all NPs. Despite the improving in ζ potentials and stability of the colloids, the obtained sizes still show a high degree of aggregation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Resilience Analysis of Service Oriented Collaboration Process Management systems

Collaborative business process management allows for the automated coordination of processes involving human and computer actors. In modern economies it is increasingly needed for this coordination to be not only within organizations but also to cross organizational boundaries. The dependence on the performance of other organizations should however be limited, and the control over the own processes is required from a competitiveness perspective. The main objective of this work is to propose an evaluation model for measuring a resilience of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) collaborative process management system. In this paper, we have proposed resilience analysis perspectives of SOA collaborative process systems, i.e. overall system perspective, individual process model perspective, individual process instance perspective, service perspective, and resource perspective. A collaborative incident and maintenance notification process system is reviewed for illustrating our resilience analysis. This research contributes to extend SOA collaborative business process management systems with resilience support, not only looking at quantification and identification of resilience factors, but also considering ways of improving the resilience of SOA collaborative process systems through measures at design and run-time

National Protocol for Model-Based Selection for Proton Therapy in Head and Neck Cancer

In the Netherlands, the model-based approach is used to identify patients with head and neck cancer who may benefit most from proton therapy in terms of prevention of late radiation-induced side effects in comparison with photon therapy. To this purpose, a National Indication Protocol Proton therapy for Head and Neck Cancer patients (NIPP-HNC) was developed, which has been approved by the health care authorities. When patients qualify according to the guidelines of the NIPP-HNC, proton therapy is fully reimbursed. This article describes the procedures that were followed to develop this NIPP-HNC and provides all necessary information to introduce model-based selection for patients with head and neck cancer into routine clinical practice.</p

Antibacterial composite coatings of metal nano-particles on textiles and plastics for medical applications

Non-woven textile materials with antimicrobial properties are of high demands for applications ranging from medical dressing to everyday cleaning products. We proposed plasma assisted route to engineer polymer films and non-woven fabrics with antimicrobial nano-composite coatings. Atmospheric pressure plasma is used for deposition of nano-composites. Nano-particles Ag, Cu and ZnO are tested as antimicrobial agents with average nano-particles size of about 50 nm. Nanoparticles are incorporated in between two layers of organosilicon film with impregnation process or alternatively through aerosol injection step. Incorporation is made in “sandwich-like structure” where top layer coating (barrier) of 5 - 50 nm thickness is used for precise control of metal ions release and reservation layer of about 200 nm is used for NPs load. The effect of the barrier coating on surface concentration of nano-particles is determined with XPS method. It is shown that increase of the thickness of the barrier layer from 5 to 25 nm leads to decrease of Ag content from 0.24 to 0.08 at. %. Similar effect is found for nano-particles of Cu and ZnO. Antibacterial efficiency of the samples against P. aeruginosa ATCC 9027 and S. aureus M u50 bacteria shows that all treated samples exhibit higher antibacterial efficiency against S. aureus. The antibacterial efficiency of AgNPs and CuNPs is above 90% which is practically interested for medical application while ZnONPs shows lower antibacterial efficiency. Cytotoxicity of the coatings and materials is investigated for different deposition conditions and analyzed in terms of possible medical applications.M.Era-Net project “PlasmaTex”info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Atmospheric-pressure plasma spray deposition of silver/HMDSO nanocomposite on polyamide 6,6 with controllable antibacterial activity

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Efficient silver nanoparticles deposition method on DBD plasma-treated polyamide 6,6 for antimicrobial textile

The study of antimicrobial fabrics with silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) incorporation has shown excellent properties in medical, pharmaceutical, cosmetics and electronics applications due to their formidable action against pathogens, preventing and treating infections.[1] The high surface-to-volume ratio from AgNPs promotes an easy release of silver ion, responsible for the antimicrobial effect.[2] The most traditional method for nanoparticles deposition onto fabrics is the pad-dry-cure technique.[3] Other methods were developed such as dip coating, electrochemical methods and layer-by-layer depositions.[4-6]. However, the major methods have several limitations for noble metals. In this work, several methods for AgNPs deposition on Dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma pre-treated polyamide 6,6 (PA66) were tested for the production of durable antibacterial textiles. DBD plasma was previously used for surface modification to increase surface energy through the introduction of polar groups altering wettability and roughness.[7] However, the study for an efficient deposition methods after plasma treatment was disregarded. SEM, XPS, cytotoxicity and antimicrobial tests were performed to evaluate the different deposition methods.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio