2,815 research outputs found
Tribo-corrosion of steel in artificial saliva
Stainless steel is widely used as dental implant. However, there has been little work on the micro-abrasion of such materials in laboratory simulated oral environments, where abrasion, sliding wear can interact simultaneously. In this study, the effects of applied load, and exposure time were evaluated for a 316 stainless steel in a laboratory simulated artificial saliva. Polarization curves showed an enhancement of corrosion current density with increases in applied load. Wear maps were produced showing low wear safety regimes at intermediate loads and exposure times. Possible reasons for such trends are interpreted in terms of the ability of the passive film in providing resistance against third body particle impact and the concentration of particles in the contact at higher loads
A map and a pipe : a new approach to characterizing erosion-corrosion regimes of Fe in three dimensions using CFD modelling
In studies of erosion-corrosion, much work has been carried out in recent years to identify regimes of behaviour. Such regimes describe the transition between the erosion and corrosion dominated mechanisms. They can also be used, by assigning various criteria, to identify other regimes of behaviour such as extent of "synergy/antagonism" in the process, so-called "additive" behaviour and the extent of wastage. Despite this work, there has been very little effort to combine the two dimensional erosion-corrosion map with CFD modelling approaches, in which the characteristics of the fluid are accounted for in the regime description. This means that extrapolation of such maps in two dimensions to a three dimensional real surface presents some difficulties. However, it is these surfaces that corrosion engineers are required to tailor, either through modification of the material composition, the surface or the process parameters, for optimum erosion-corrosion resistance. In this paper, a methodology is generated to combine the concepts of CFD modelling, and the erosion-corrosion regime map for a specific geometry and for a range of pure metals in descending order in the Galvanic series. The changes in regimes are presented as a function of variation in the erosion and corrosion variables i.e. particle size, hardness and solution pH. Erosion-corrosion regimes are presented, based on the model results, showing the wide range of mechanistic and wastage mechanisms possible over the component surface
A feasibility study of signed consent for the collection of patient identifiable information for a national paediatric clinical audit database
Objectives: To investigate the feasibility of obtaining signed consent
for submission of patient identifiable data to a national clinical
audit database and to identify factors influencing the consent process
and its success.
Design: Feasibility study.
Setting: Seven paediatric intensive care units in England.
Participants: Parents/guardians of patients, or patients aged 12-16
years old, approached consecutively over three months for signed
consent for submission of patient identifiable data to the national
clinical audit database the Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network
(PICANet).
Main outcome measures: The numbers and proportions of admissions for
which signed consent was given, refused, or not obtained (form not
returned or form partially completed but not signed), by age, sex,
level of deprivation, ethnicity (South Asian or not), paediatric index
of mortality score, length of hospital stay (days in paediatric
intensive care).
Results: One unit did not start and one did not fully implement the
protocol, so analysis excluded these two units. Consent was obtained
for 182 of 422 admissions (43%) (range by unit 9% to 84%). Most
(101/182; 55%) consents were taken by staff nurses. One refusal (0.2%)
was received. Consent rates were significantly better for children who
were more severely ill on admission and for hospital stays of six days
or more, and significantly poorer for children aged 10-14 years. Long
hospital stays and children aged 10-14 years remained significant in a
stepwise regression model of the factors that were significant in the
univariate model.
Conclusion: Systematically obtaining individual signed consent for
sharing patient identifiable information with an externally located
clinical audit database is difficult. Obtaining such consent is
unlikely to be successful unless additional resources are specifically
allocated to training, staff time, and administrative support
Gribov Copies in the Maximally Abelian Gauge and Confinement
We fix lattice gauge fields to the Maximally Abelian gauge in both
three and four dimensions. We extract the corresponding fields and
monopole current densities and calculate separately the confining string
tensions arising from these fields and monopole `condensates'. We
generate multiple Gribov copies and study how the fields and monopole
distributions vary between these different copies. As expected, we find
substantial variations in the number of monopoles, their locations and in the
values of the field strengths. The string tensions extracted from
`extreme' Gribov copies also differ but this difference appears to be no more
than about 20\%. We also directly compare the fields of different Gribov
copies. We find that on the distance scales relevant to confinement the
and monopole fluxes that disorder Wilson loops are highly correlated between
these different Gribov copies. All this suggests that while there is indeed a
Gribov copy problem the resulting ambiguity is, in this gauge and for the study
of confinement, of limited importance.Comment: 31 pages LaTeX plus 5 PostScript figures. Uses epsf.sty.
Self-unpacking, uuencoded tar-compressed fil
String Tension from Monopoles in SU(2) Lattice Gauge Theory
The axis for Figure 2 was wrong. It has been fixed and the postscript file
replaced (The file was called comp.ps).Comment: (22 pages latex (revtex); 2 figures appended as postscript files -
search for mono.ps and comp.ps. Figures mailed on request--send a note to
[email protected]) Preprint ILL-(TH)-94-#1
Monopole clusters, Z(2) vortices and confinement in SU(2)
We extend our previous study of magnetic monopole currents in the maximally
Abelian gauge [hep-lat/9712003] to larger lattices at small lattice spacings
(20^4 at beta = 2.5 and 32^4 at beta = 2.5115). We confirm that at these weak
couplings there continues to be one monopole cluster that is very much longer
than the rest and that the string tension, K, is entirely due to it. The
remaining clusters are compact objects whose population as a function of radius
follows a power law that deviates from the scale invariant form, but much too
weakly to suggest a link with the analytically calculable size distribution of
small instantons. We also search for traces of Z(2) vortices in the Abelian
projected fields; either as closed loops of `magnetic' flux or through
appropriate correlations amongst the monopoles. We find, by direct calculation,
that there is no confining condensate of such flux loops. We also find, through
the calculation of doubly charged Wilson loops within the monopole fields, that
there is no suppression of the q=2 effective string tension out to at distances
of at least r ~ 1.6/sqrt{K}, suggesting that if there are any vortices they are
not encoded in the monopole fields.Comment: 26 pages of LaTeX and PostScript figure
Vortex critical behavior at the de-confinement phase transition
The de-confinement phase transition in SU(2) Yang-Mills theory is revisited
in the vortex picture. Defining the world sheets of the confining vortices by
maximal center projection, the percolation properties of the vortex lines in
the hypercube consisting of the time axis and two spatial axis are studied.
Using the percolation cumulant, the temperature for the percolation transition
is seen to be in good agreement with the critical temperature of the thermal
transition. The finite size scaling function for the cumulant is obtained. The
critical index of the finite size scaling function is consistent with the index
of the 3D Ising model.Comment: 4 pages, 4 PS figures, using revtex4, paragraph and refs added, typo
correcte
Remarks on abelian dominance
We used a renormalisation group based smoothing to address two questions
related to abelian dominance. Smoothing drastically reduces short distance
fluctuations but it preserves the long distance physical properties of the
SU(2) configurations. This enabled us to extract the abelian heavy-quark
potential from time-like Wilson loops on Polyakov gauge projected
configurations. We obtained a very small string tension which is inconsistent
with the string tension extracted from Polyakov loop correlators. This shows
that the Polyakov gauge projected abelian configurations do not have a
consistent physical meaning. We also applied the smoothing on SU(2)
configurations to test how sensitive abelian dominance in the maximal abelian
gauge is to the short distance fluctuations. We found that on smoothed SU(2)
configurations the abelian string tension was about 30% smaller than the SU(2)
string tension which was unaffected by smoothing. This suggests that the
approximate abelian dominance found with the Wilson action is probably an
accident and it has no fundamental physical relevance.Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX, 3 eps figure
Visual Performance in Patients with Neovascular Age-Related Macular Degeneration Undergoing Treatment with Intravitreal Ranibizumab
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Purpose. To assess visual function and its response to serial intravitreal ranibizumab (Lucentis, Genentech) in patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nv-AMD). Methods. Forty-seven eyes of 47 patients with nv-AMD, and corrected distance visual acuity (CDVA) logMAR 0.7 or better, undergoing intravitreal injections of ranibizumab, were enrolled into this prospective study. Visual function was assessed using a range of psychophysical tests, while mean foveal thickness (MFT) was determined by optical coherence tomography (OCT). Results. Group mean (±sd) MFT reduced significantly from baseline (233 (±59)) to exit (205 (±40)) ( ). CDVA exhibited no change between baseline and exit visits ( and , resp.). Measures of visual function that did exhibit statistically significant improvements ( for all) included reading acuity, reading speed, mesopic and photopic contrast sensitivity (CS), mesopic and photopic glare disability (GD), and retinotopic ocular sensitivity (ROS) at all eccentricities. Conclusion. Eyes with nv-AMD undergoing intravitreal ranibizumab injections exhibit improvements in many parameters of visual function. Outcome measures other than CDVA, such as CS, GD, and ROS, should not only be considered in the design of studies investigating nv-AMD, but also in treatment and retreatment strategies for patients with the condition
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