Sawsan Dacrory^1*, Hussein Abou-Yousef¹, Ragab E. Abou-Zeid¹, Samir Kamel¹, Mohamed S. Abdel-Aziz², Mohamed Elbadry³

Journal of Renewable Materials, Vol.6, No.5, pp. 536-547, 2018, DOI:10.7569/JRM.2017.634190

Abstract Carboxymethyl cellulose hydrogels were developed through crosslinking process using eco-friendly crosslinkers such as maleic, succinic, and citric acids. Carboxymethyl cellulose was prepared from the cellulosic fraction of olive industry residues. A series of hydrogels with varying crosslinker acid concentrations, reaction times, and reaction temperatures was produced to study the swelling capacities and gel fraction of the obtained hydrogels. Additional study pertains to the preparation of antimicrobial nanocomposite hydrogels through in-situ incorporation of the silver nanoparticles during the crosslinking reaction. Silver nanoparticles were prepared by reduction of AgNO3with leaves of Ricinus communis. The particle size of prepared silver nanoparticles was detected… More >

Elena Fortunati^1*, Francesca Luzi¹, Chiara Fanali², Laura Dugo², Maria Giovanna Belluomo², Luigi Torre¹, José Maria Kenny¹, Luca Santi³, Roberta Bernini³

Journal of Renewable Materials, Vol.5, No.2, pp. 81-95, 2017, DOI:10.7569/JRM.2016.634132

Abstract Hydroxytyrosol (HTyr), a biophenol found in extra-virgin olive oil or olive oil by-products, well known for its strong antioxidant activity, was used as active ingredient for poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) matrix to develop film formulations by solvent casting process. The effect of HTyr on the morphological, thermal stability, optical, mechanical and release properties of PVA were investigated, while water absorption capacity, migration with food stimulants, water vapor permeability and antioxidant properties were tested taking into account the final application as food packaging systems. Morphological investigations evidenced homogeneity of all PVA/HTyr films, while the presence of HTyr clearly accounted for an increase… More >

Dragomir Vassilev^1*, Nadezhda Petkova², Milena Koleva¹, Panteley Denev²

Journal of Renewable Materials, Vol.4, No.1, pp. 24-30, 2016, DOI:10.7569/JRM.2015.634125

Abstract This article presents the results obtained by the ultrasound-assisted synthesis of sucrose and fructooligosaccharides (FOS) esters with fatty acids (palmitic and 10-undecylenic), the identifi cation of the products and the study of their possible application as plasticizers in plastics processing. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and nuclear magnetic resonance (¹H and ¹³C NMR) spectroscopy were used to identify the synthesized carbohydrate esters. The plasticizing effect of the sucrose palmitate applied in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) was evaluated by the glass transition temperatures; the decrease of the T_g with the increase of the ester content could be accepted as confi rmation of… More >

Mingzhi Luo¹, Kai Ni¹, Peili Yu¹, Yang Jin², Lei Liu¹, Jingjing Li¹, Yan Pan¹, Linhong Deng^1,*

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.16, No.2, pp. 141-151, 2019, DOI:10.32604/mcb.2019.06756

Abstract Airway hyperresponsiveness (AHR) is the cardinal character of asthma, which involves the biomechanical properties such as cell stiffness and traction force of airway smooth muscle cells (ASMCs). Therefore, these biomechanical properties comprise logical targets of therapy. β2-adrenergic agonist is currently the mainstream drug to target ASMCs in clinical practice for treating asthma. However, this drug is known for side effects such as desensitization and non-responsiveness in some patients. Therefore, it is desirable to search for new drug agents to be alternative of β2-adrenergic agonist. In this context, sanguinarine, a natural product derived from plants such as bloodroots, that has been… More >

Yequan Wang^*, Li Yang^*, Jin Zhang^*, Ruyue Xue^*, Zhenyu Tang^*, Wei Huang^†, Dianming Jiang^†, Xinyan Tang^*, Peter Chen^‡, KL Paul Sung^{∗,‡,§,¶}

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.7, No.2, pp. 105-114, 2010, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2010.007.105

Abstract The anterior cruciate ligament, posterior cruciate ligament, cartilage and meniscus in human knee joint have poor healing ability. Accumulation of MMPs in the joint fluids due to knee injury has been considered as the main reason. Our previous experiments showed that synovium may be the major regulator of MMPs in joint cavity after injury. In this paper, we used human synoviocytes harvested from synovium to determine whether mechanical injury and inflammatory factors will induce MMP-2 production in synoviocytes. With zymography, we found that mechanical compression increased the MMP-2 production by 23% under 6% compressions, 61% under 12% compression and 109%… More >

Sunil Kr. Jha¹, Zulfiqar Ahmad²

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.113, No.4, pp. 443-459, 2017, DOI:10.3970/cmes.2017.113.443

Abstract Microbial population and enzyme activities are the significant indicators of soil strength. Soil microbial dynamics characterize microbial population and enzyme activities. The present study explores the development of efficient predictive modeling systems for the estimation of specific soil microbial dynamics, like rock phosphate solubilization, bacterial population, and ACC-deaminase activity. More specifically, optimized subtractive clustering (SC) and Wang and Mendel's (WM) fuzzy inference systems (FIS) have been implemented with the objective to achieve the best estimation accuracy of microbial dynamics. Experimental measurements were performed using controlled pot experiment using minimal salt media with rock phosphate as sole carbon source inoculated with… More >

G. Kakuba¹, M. J. H. Anthonissen²

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.99, No.6, pp. 445-462, 2014, DOI:10.3970/cmes.2014.099.445

Abstract The aim in this paper is to develop a new local defect correction approach to gridding for problems with localised regions of high activity in the boundary element method. The technique of local defect correction has been studied for other methods as finite difference methods and finite volume methods. The initial attempts to developing such a technique by the authors for the boundary element method was based on block decomposition and manipulation of the coefficient matrix and right hand side of the system of equations in three dimension. It ignored the inherent global nature of the boundary integral equation, that… More >

G. Kakuba¹, R.M.M. Mattheij², M.J.H. Anthonissen³

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.15, No.3, pp. 127-136, 2006, DOI:10.3970/cmes.2006.015.127

Abstract This paper presents an efficient way to implement the Boundary Element Method (BEM) to capture high activity regions in a boundary value problem. In boundary regions where accuracy is critical, like in adaptive surface meshes, the method of choice is Local Defect Correction (LDC). We formulate the method and demonstrate its applicability and reliability by means of an example. Numerical results show that LDC and BEM together provide accurate solutions with less computational requirements given that BEM systems usually consist of dense matrices. More >

Praveen Ch.¹, Shishir Sinha^1,2

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.9, No.1, pp. 41-50, 2009, DOI:10.3970/cmc.2009.009.041

Abstract Fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) unit plays most important role in the economy of a modern refinery that it is use for value addition to the refinery products. Because of the importance of FCC unit in refining, considerable effort has been done by scientists till now on the modelling of this unit for better understanding and improved productivity. To model a FCC unit we have to know the unknown kinetic parameters of the governing equations.
The basic aim of this paper is to prove that MATLAB^TM can be used as a tool to find unknown kinetic parameters of governing equations for… More >