Low temperature carburizing (LTC) treatment improves surface hardness and wear resistance of the austenitic stainless steels without reducing their corrosion resistance. Surface hardness over 1000 Vickers and compressive residual stresses whose modulus exceeds 1500 MPa are usually achieved in the carburized layer, thanks to the formation of the so-called “S-phase”, a carbonsupersaturated austen...

Polymeric drug delivery systems usually deliver drugs by diffusion with an initial burst of release followed by a slower prolonged release phase. An optimal system would release exact doses of drugs using an on-demand external actuation system. The purpose of this study was to design and characterize a novel drug-delivery device that utilizes near infrared (NIR 800 nm) laser-actuated drug relea...

The Multi-DOF forceps manipulator we developed has two additional DOF of bending on the tip of forceps, and provides new surgical fields and techniques for surgeons. The most remarkable characteristics of the prototype described in this paper are: 1) the small diameter and the small radius of curvature of bending; 2) the confirmation of perfect cleanness and sterilization of this manipulator. I...

The technique of laser micro-processing has recently found several important and widespread applications in the manufacturing of disk-drive components. Examples provided here include the cleaning of surface contaminants, the formation of “nano-bumps” on disk surfaces for controlled surface texturing or for making nanometer-height standards, and the micro-bending of magnetic head sliders for fli...

Progress in the analysis of the infrared spectrum of CH(3)OH in the 930-1450 cm(-1) region has led to assignments, confirmations, or new insights for a number of far-infrared laser (FIRL) transition systems optically pumped by CO(2) lasers. Many of the systems involve FIRL transitions among the CO-stretching, CH(3)-rocking, OH-bending, and CH(3)-deformation vibrational modes, giving useful info...

Hollow-sapphire and metal-dielectric-coated hollow-glass waveguides have been used to deliver CO(2) laser power for industrial laser applications. The transmission, bending loss, and output-beam properties of these waveguides are described. The bore sizes of the hollow-sapphire waveguides were 1070 and 790 μm, and the hollow-glass waveguide had a bore of 700 μm. The waveguides ranged in length ...

Welding-induced distortion is an intrinsic phenomenon arising due to the thermally induced strain distributions in the weld and surrounding material. The distortion can be minimized during the pre-process, real-time, or postprocess stages. In the present paper, the laser forming (LF) technology is utilized for the post correction of welding-induced distortion. The out-of-plane distortion can be...

Hollow polycarbonate waveguides with thin-film coatings of Ag-AgI were fabricated by liquid-phase chemistry methods. These hollow waveguides, which have bore sizes ranging from 500 to 2000 microm and lengths as long as 2 m, are transmissive from 2 to more than 20 microm. The lowest loss of 0.02 dB/m was obtained for a straight 2000 microm bore guide at 10.6 microm. This is to our knowledge the ...

Quasi-periodic structures of natural biomaterial membranes have great potentials to serve as resonance cavities to generate ecological friendly optoelectronic devices with low cost. To achieve the first attempt for the illustration of the underlying principle, the Pieris canidia butterfly wing was embedded with ZnO nanoparticles. Quite interestingly, it is found that the bio-inspired quasi-sing...

A short wavelength far infrared laser whose wavelength lambda is about 50 microm is preferable for a polarimeter and an interferometer for high density operations in the Large Helical Device (LHD) and on future large fusion devices such as ITER. This is because the beam bending effect (proportional to lambda(2)) in a plasma, which causes fringe jump errors, is small and the Faraday and the Cott...