Nephrectomy for a case of intrarenal dermoid cyst: was it an appropriate decision?

Dermoid cyst in a kidney is rarely seen. We report a case of intrarenal dermoid cyst which mimics malignant renal tumour and discuss the dilemma in managing this disease

A simple variational approach to the quantum Frenkel-Kontorova model

We present a simple and complete variational approach to the one-dimensional quantum Frenkel-Kontorova model. Dirac's time-dependent variational principle is adopted together with a Hatree-type many-body trial wavefunction for the atoms. The single-particle state is assumed to have the Jackiw-Kerman form. We obtain an effective classical Hamiltonian for the system which is simple enough for a complete numerical solution for the static ground state of the model. Numerical results show that our simple approach captures the essence of the quantum effects first observed in quantum Monte Carlo studies.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

Parallel updating cellular automaton models of driven diffusive Frenkel-Kontorova-type systems

Three cellular automaton (CA) models of increasing complexity are introduced to model driven diffusive systems related to the generalized Frenkel-Kontorova (FK) models recently proposed by Braun [Phys.Rev.E58, 1311 (1998)]. The models are defined in terms of parallel updating rules. Simulation results are presented for these models. The features are qualitatively similar to those models defined previously in terms of sequentially updating rules. Essential features of the FK model such as phase transitions, jamming due to atoms in the immobile state, and hysteresis in the relationship between the fraction of atoms in the running state and the bias field are captured. Formulating in terms of parallel updating rules has the advantage that the models can be treated analytically by following the time evolution of the occupation on every site of the lattice. Results of this analytical approach are given for the two simpler models. The steady state properties are found by studying the stable fixed points of a closed set of dynamical equations obtained within the approximation of retaining spatial correlations only upto two nearest neighboring sites. Results are found to be in good agreement with numerical data.Comment: 26 pages, 4 eps figure

PLA/WOOD BIOCOMPOSITES: IMPROVING COMPOSITE STRENGTH BY CHEMICAL TREATMENT OF THE FIBERS

A resol type phenolic resin was prepared for the impregnation of wood particles used for the reinforcement of PLA. A preliminary study showed that the resin penetrates wood with rates depending on the concentration of the solution and on temperature. Treatment with a solution of 1 wt% resin resulted in a considerable increase of composite strength and decrease of water absorption. Composite strength improved as a result of increased inherent strength of the wood, but interfacial adhesion might be modified as well. When wood was treated with resin solutions of larger concentrations, the strength of the composites decreased, first slightly, then drastically to a very small value. A larger amount of resin results in a thick coating on wood with inferior mechanical properties. At large resin contents the mechanism of deformation changes; the thick coating breaks very easily leading to the catastrophic failure of the composites at very small loads

Outage probability analysis of WPT systems with multiple-antenna access point

© 2016 IEEE. This paper analyzes the performance of a multiple-antenna access point (AP) system with an energy-constrained single-antenna destination node in various Bernoulli-Gaussian impulsive noise environments. More specifically, we deploy the harvest-then-transmit protocol where communication is accomplished over two distinct phases: i) power transfer phase (downlink), ii) information transmission phase (up-link). In this respect, an analytical expression for the ergodic outage probability is derived and validated with Monte Carlo simulations. Results have shown that increasing the source transmit power or/and the number of AP antennas will minimize the ergodic outage probability. It is also presented that careful selection of the energy harvesting time is important to enhance the system performance