In this study, the applicability of nanofiltration (NF) membranes as a pretreatment prior to reverse osmosis (RO) in seawater desalination was investigated. The membranes used wereNF270 and NF90 as the NF membranes, while the brackish water (BW) RO membrane BW30 was used as the RO membrane. In desalination tests, permeates of the NF membraneswere collected and used as the feed to th...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the reulceration and reamputation rates in a cohort of diabetic patients following first ray amputation. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We evaluated a cohort of 89 diabetic patients, 63 men and 26 women, who underwent first ray amputation in the period from January 2000 to December 2001. The first ray lesions were Wagner grade 2 in 3 patients, Wagner grade 3 in 47 patients,...

For many promising application areas, autonomous mobile manipulators do not yet exhibit sufficiently robust performance. We propose the use of tags applied to task-relevant locations in human environments in order to help autonomous mobile manipulators physically interact with the location, perceive the location, and understand the location’s semantics. We call these tags physical, perceptual a...

The ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) with oil damper, GaitSolution (GS), was previously developed to make heel rocker function possible during the gait of hemiplegic patients. To clarify the characteristics of patients who show adaptation to GS use, a questionnaire was completed by the clinicians responsible for 99 patients with hemiplegia who participated in this study. Clinicians completed items con...

This paper presents a stair-climbing mobile platform built on the Rocker–Bogie mechanism which enables to effectively climb up/down various sizes of stairs in indoor environments without violating its mobile stability. First, the link parameters of Rocker–Bogie mechanism are optimally chosen via the Taguchi method in order to make the trajectory of its center of mass (CM) as smooth as possible,...

[Purpose] This study aimed to analyze the effect of heel pads in ankle-foot orthoses on dynamic motion aspects of gait in stroke patients from the viewpoint of energy conversion efficiency. [Subjects] Fourteen chronic stroke patients who were ambulatory and had lower extremity motor function categorized as Brunnstrom stage IV participated in the study. [Methods] A three-dimensional motion analy...

In order to achieve more accurate and reliable identification of shearer cutting state, this paper employs the vibration of rocker transmission part and proposes a diagnosis method based on a probabilistic neural network (PNN) and fruit fly optimization algorithm (FOA). The original FOA is modified with a multi-swarm strategy to enhance the search performance and the modified FOA is utilized to...

Experimental and theoretical studies are made of a typical snap-action rocker switch, to establish the wear mechanisms in the pivoting contact. The rocker switch, used extensive~ in consumer goods, operates in the medium duty current range, (1 30 Amps). Highspeed photographic studies have shown that the main cause of wear is arcing, occurri~ during separation and bounce at the pivot contacts. T...