In this study, the process of membrane cleaning by supercritical fluid extraction was investigated. Polypropylene microfiltration membranes, contaminated with oils, were treated in a batch process with a supercritical fluid (SCF). As extractant, pure supercritical carbon dioxide or supercritical carbon dioxide with admixtures of methanol, ethanol and isopropanol were used. Single-stage and multi-stage extraction was carried out and process efficiency was determined. The obtained results showed that addition of organic solvents significantly enhances the cleaning performance, which increases with increase of organic solvent concentration and decreases with increasing temperature. All three solvents showed a comparable effect of efficiency enhancement. The results confirmed that supercritical fluid extraction can be applied for polypropylene membrane cleaning.
The techniques of micro and nano structurization of surfaces of various materials are utilized in electronics and medicine. Such procedure as wet and dry etching allows to fabricate protruded or recessed micro and nanostructures on the surface. In the paper some examples of utilization of a surface structurization, known from literature, are described. Some structurization methods and experimental results for fabrication of the arrays of sharp microtips are presented. Wet and/or dry etching, and thermal oxidation process were used to form the arrays of sharp gated and non-gated, protruded or recessed silicon microtips on silicon wafer. For the first time, the arrays of silicon carbide (SiC) microtips on glass wafer have been produced by use of the transfer mold technique. Arrays of sharp microtips are used as field electron emission cathodes for vacuum microelectronics devices. Some electron emission measurements for these cathodes have been carried out. New application of silicon microtips array in biochemistry has been tested with satisfactory results.
The effectiveness of half flat tip serrations on reducing fan blade trailing edge noise was investigated using experimental methods. The experiments were conducted at an anechoic chamber under different rotating fan speeds. Numerical simulations were performed to investigate the mass flow rate generated by the serrated fan and compared with that by the baseline fan. The experimental results showed that the overall amount of noise reduction decreased with the increasing of the distance away from the fan. It was found that the effectiveness of the serrations was not proportional with the rotating speed of the fan where it was most effective at 263 rpm and 2041 rpm with noise reductions about 3.1 dBA and 3.5 dBA, respectively. This phenomenon might be depended on how trailing edge vortex would interact with the serrations at different speeds of the fan. The reduction of mass flow rate reduced with the increasing of the rotating speed and the highest reduction was found at 263 rpm which was about 18% and this reduction was accompanied by overall noise reduction of 3.1 dBA.
This paper explores the influence of linear gear tip relief modification on power transmission efficiency. In real time applications gears experience transmission error (TE) during operation which increases noise and vibration and also results in increased tooth profile deformation during operation of the gear. By providing tip relief profile modification this TE can be decreased. Using MATLAB for computation and ANSYS for the simulation of deformation, stress, strain, life, and factor of safety results for the gear assemblies are obtained. Deformation results are used for the computation change in power transmission efficiency followed by the modal and harmonic analysis of the gears and gear assemblies to determine change in the first mode of natural frequency.
The precise location of the needle tip is critical in robot-assisted needle-based percutaneous interventions. An automatic needle tip measuring system based on binocular vision technology with the advantages of non-contact, excellent accuracy and high stability is designed and evaluated. First the measurement requirements of the prostate intervention robot are introduced. A laser interferometer is used as the reference for measuring the position of the needle tip whose relative position variation is described as the needle tip distance in the time domain. The parameters of the binocular cameras are obtained by Zhang’s calibration method. Then a robust needle tip extraction algorithm is specially designed to detect the pixel coordinates of the needle tip without installing the marked points. Once the binocular cameras have completed the stereo matching, the 3D coordinates of the needle tip are estimated. The measurement capability analysis (MCA) is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The accuracy of the system can be controlled within 0.3621 mm. The agreement analysis is conducted by the Bland–Altman analysis, and the Pearson correlation coefficient is 0.999847. The P/T ratio value is 16.42% in the repeatability analysis. The results indicate that the accuracy and stability of the binocular vision needle tip measuring system are adequate to meet the requirement for the needle tip measurement in percutaneous interventions.