Mfiso Emmanuel Mngomezulu¹, Adriaan Stephanus Luyt², Steve Anthony Chapple³, Maya Jacob John^3,4*

Journal of Renewable Materials, Vol.6, No.1, pp. 26-37, 2018, DOI:10.7569/JRM.2017.634140

Abstract This work reports on the effect of commercial expandable graphite (EG) on the flammability and thermal decomposition properties of PLA-starch blend. The PLA-starch/EG composites were prepared by melt-mixing and their thermal stability, volatile pyrolysis products and flammability characteristics were investigated. The char residues of the composites, after combustion in a cone calorimeter, were analyzed with environmental scanning electron microscopy (ESEM). The thermal decomposition stability of the composites improved in the presence of EG. However, the char content was less than expected as per the combination of the wt% EG added into PLA-starch and the %… More >

Tongfa Deng^1,2, Junping Zhang^1,3,*, Mahmoud Bayat⁴

Structural Durability & Health Monitoring, Vol.12, No.3, pp. 189-212, 2018, DOI:10.3970/sdhm.2018.04392

Abstract The isolated curved girder bridge's vibration characteristics play a major part in the seismic responses of structures and anti-seismic properties. A clear analytic relationship between design parameters and the system's vibration characteristics could be established by its simplified dynamic analysis model, making it convenient for providing a reference to the optimization of design and safety analysis. A double-mass six-degree-of-freedom model for curved girder bridges with isolation bearings installed at the top of the bridge piers is built and a simplified analysis method for the vibration characteristics of the system is provided. Combined with the Matlab… More >

C. K. Madhusudana¹, N. Gangadhar¹, Hemantha Kumar, Kumar,^*,1, S. Narendranath¹

Structural Durability & Health Monitoring, Vol.12, No.2, pp. 111-127, 2018, DOI:10.3970/sdhm.2018.01262

Abstract This paper presents the fault diagnosis of face milling tool based on machine learning approach. While machining, spindle vibration signals in feed direction under healthy and faulty conditions of the milling tool are acquired. A set of discrete wavelet features is extracted from the vibration signals using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) technique. The decision tree technique is used to select significant features out of all extracted wavelet features. C-support vector classification (C-SVC) and ν-support vector classification (ν-SVC) models with different kernel functions of support vector machine (SVM) are used to study and classify the tool More >

Yang Li^1,*, Dongwei Yang¹, Jiangkun Zhang¹

Structural Durability & Health Monitoring, Vol.12, No.1, pp. 51-63, 2018, DOI:10.3970/sdhm.2018.012.051

Abstract Diffusion behavior of chloride ion in reinforced concrete under bending moment was studied by taking the ratio of bending moment to ultimate flexural capacity as load level indicator. The function relationship between load level and chloride ion diffusion coefficient was established, based on that the limit state equation of the chloride ion critical concentration and chloride ion concentration on surface of the steel bar was established. Then by applying Monte-Carlo method the corrosion probability of reinforcement under different load levels in splash zone was calculated. Calculation results demonstrated that compared with the durability reliability index More >

Licai Zhao^1,*, Shishuenn Chen

Structural Durability & Health Monitoring, Vol.12, No.1, pp. 35-50, 2018, DOI:10.3970/sdhm.2018.012.035

Abstract In the process of railway construction, because of the inconvenience of geological condition, water bursting and mud surging happen frequently, and the later deformation of support structure on the happening geology section would threaten the normal running of railway. The limit difference of deformation control value of the support structure section where geological accidents frequently happen, is small, and artificial half-automatic supervisory technology cannot get the health condition of tunnel in time, resulting many cars speed-down accidents due to deformation of support structure. Through design innovation, we introduce TGMIS in the later period of Yanzishan… More >

Junhao Yang¹, Chunxiao Chen^1,*, Qingyang Zang¹, Jianfei Li¹

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.4, pp. 203-214, 2018, DOI:10.32604/mcb.2018.03824

Abstract Pathological slide is increasingly applied in the diagnosis of breast tumors despite the issues of large amount of data, slow viewing and high subjectivity. To overcome these problems, a micrograph recognition method based on convolutional neural network is proposed for pathological slide of breast tumor. Combined with multi-channel threshold and watershed segmentation, a sample database including single cell, adhesive cell and invalid cell was established. Then, the convolution neural network with six layers is constructed, which has ability to classify the stained breast tumor cells with accuracy of more than 90%, and evaluate the proliferation More >

Solenne Mondésert-Deveraux^{1, *}, Rachele Allena², Denis Aubry¹

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.3, pp. 155-176, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.03053

Abstract Cell migration is the cornerstone of many biological phenomena such as cancer metastasis, immune response or organogenesis. Adhesion-based motility is the most renown and examined motility mode, but in an adhesion-free confined environment or simply to achieve a higher migration speed, cells can adopt a very interesting bleb-based migration mode called “chimneying”. This mode rests on the sharp synchronization between the active contraction of the cells uropod and the passive friction force between the cell and the confining surface. In this paper, we propose a one dimensional poroelastic model of chimneying which considers the active… More >

JongWon Kim^1,2, Ning Li², Ramana Pidaparti^2,*, Xianqiao Wang^2,*

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.3, pp. 127-141, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.02669

Abstract Nonlinear microstructure of the microtubules (MTs) plays an important role in their mechanical properties. Despite the extensive efforts into the development of continuum models for microtubules, a mesoscale finite element model that can link the molecular level information to the overall performance of microtubules is still missing. The aim of this study is to develop a molecular dynamics model (MDM), finite element model (FEM) and structural mechanics beam model (SMBM) for tubulins of protofilament (PF). In MDM, the backbone atoms of α-tubulin were fixed while the backbone atoms of β-tubulin were attached to a molecular… More >

Yuxiang Huang¹, Chuliu He¹, Jiaqiu Wang², Yuehong Miao¹, Tongjin Zhu¹, Ping Zhou¹, Zhiyong Li^1,2,*

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.2, pp. 117-125, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.02478

Abstract Intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) is becoming more and more popular in clinical diagnosis of coronary atherosclerotic. However, reading IVOCT images is of large amount of work. This article describes a method based on image feature extraction and support vector machine (SVM) to achieve semi-automatic segmentation of IVOCT images. The image features utilized in this work including light attenuation coefficients and image textures based on gray level co-occurrence matrix. Different sets of hyper-parameters and image features were tested. This method achieved an accuracy of 83% on the test images. Single class accuracy of 89% for More >

Zhedian Zhou¹, Tal Geva², Rahul H. Rathod², Alexander Tang², Chun Yang³, Kristen L. Billiar⁴, Dalin Tang^1,*,3, Pedro del Nido⁵

Molecular & Cellular Biomechanics, Vol.15, No.2, pp. 99-115, 2018, DOI:10.3970/mcb.2018.00558

Abstract Patients with repaired Tetralogy of Fallot (ToF), a congenital heart defect which includes a ventricular septal defect and severe right ventricular outflow obstruction, account for the majority of cases with late onset right ventricle (RV) failure. The current surgical approach, which includes pulmonary valve replacement/insertion (PVR), has yielded mixed results. A computational parametric study using 7 patient-specific RV/LV models based on cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) data as "virtual surgery" was performed to investigate the impact of patch size, RV remodeling and tissue regeneration in PVR surgery design on RV cardiac functions. Two patch sizes, three… More >