Respiratory and heart failure are conditions that can occur with little warning and may also be difficult to predict. Therefore continuous monitoring of these bio-signals is advantageous for ensuring human health. The car safety belt is mainly designed to secure the occupants of the vehicle in the event of an accident. In the current research a prototype safety belt is developed, which is used ...

This paper deals with a hybrid actuator composed by a piezo part and a hydraulic one and with a cascade PID-PID control structure for camless engine motor applications. The idea is to use the advantages of both, the high precision of the piezo part and the force of the hydraulic one. In fact, piezoelectric actuators (PEAs) are commonly used for precision positionings, despite PEAs present nonli...

The paper discusses the problem of the characterisation of untwisted, untapered, anisotropic and non-homogeneous straight beams with embedded piezo-electric devices. The determination of the section properties, i.e. the generalised electro-elastic sti ness and compliance matrices, is performed through an in-plane discretisation in a nite element way, in which the axial dependence of the unknown...

Monolithic piezoelectric sensors commonly used for acoustic emission and ultrasonic inspection are non-conforming, bulky, costly and heavy. This means they do not fit well to complex geometries, they can be susceptible to damage, and on larger structures their cost and weight can be prohibitive. An alternative to this is the use of piezo-electric thick films, which comprise of piezo-electric pa...

In 2008 the U.S. Department of Energy set a target of 20% wind energy by 2030. To date, induction-based turbines form the mainstay of this effort, but turbines are noisy, perceived as unattractive, a potential hazard to bats and birds, and their height hampers deployment in residential settings. Several groups have proposed that artificial plants containing piezoelectric elements may harvest wi...

In the presented work model and experiments of compliant robots with piezo actuators are carried out. The robot is designed to perform automatic injection of cells in the range of 10-30 μm. A kinematics model of serial-parallel structures is presented. Pseudo rigid body approach is used, where the elastic joints are modelled as revolute joints. Models for tension of parallel structures with ela...

BACKGROUND Over the past several years, mammals have been successfully cloned by either the splitting of an early stage embryo or nuclear transfer of adult somatic cells (NT) into oocytes. Although it has been 15 years since the generation of the first cloned mammals from somatic cells by NT, the success rate for producing live offspring by this technique is low regardless of the cell type and ...

Hereditary xerocytosis (HX, MIM 194380) is an autosomal dominant hemolytic anemia characterized by primary erythrocyte dehydration. Copy number analyses, linkage studies, and exome sequencing were used to identify novel mutations affecting PIEZO1, encoded by the FAM38A gene, in 2 multigenerational HX kindreds. Segregation analyses confirmed transmission of the PIEZO1 mutations and cosegregation...