Ingenious Devices Research Articles

Magnifying and Tracking Observation of Micro PET Particles Passing through a Plane Premixed Flame Front

In order to observe detailed behavior of micro plastic particles under rapid heating, a fundamental investigation is made by introducing two ingenious devices; one is the construction of a plane laminar premixed burner exhibiting extremely excellent two-dimensionality, the other is the construction of a magnifying particle-tracking system composed of a pair of rotating plane mirrors and a fixed high-speed video camera. Taking account of the flow patterns obtained using a PIV/PTV system, a series of heating processes from melting to burning of micro PET particles passing through a laminar flame sheet is optically observed. It is found that the proposed high-speed and magnifying tracking system can realize a wide straight range of particle tracking up to 50 mm and clarify many interesting facts concerning the ignition and burning processes of micro PET particles.

The Inventors

Amongst Australian anaesthetists there have been many whose ingenuity and mechanical knowledge produced ingenious devices. Lidwill and Geoffrey Kaye come immediately to mind, and their contributions are well-described elsewhere. In this paper, two inventions with contrasting fates are described: the Grant Humidifier and the Komesaroff single-use analgesia device. Graham Grant's invention addressed the problem of rain-out in a most ingenious manner The device was compact, efficient and deserved greater commercial success, but a similar apparatus developed in New Zealand was better supported and captured most of the market. Grant has a degree in engineering, acquired before his medical degree, but David Komesaroff spent only a year in the Engineering Faculty before transferring to Medicine. Nevertheless, he has remained interested and in touch with technical matters, and has a number of other devices to his credit. Mention is briefly made of others: Stokes (of the suction bullet), Bill Cole (an early volatile specific vaporiser), Fisk (the paediatric ventilator) and Noel Cass (the Cass needle) These achievements are by no means the end of the road. Already an Australian-designed single-use laryngoscope is being manufactured and launched on both the national and international markets.

Announcement

ANNOUNCEMENTSAnnouncementPublished Online:01 May 2006https://doi.org/10.1152/ajprenal.00018.2006MoreSectionsPDF (37 KB)Download PDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesGet permissionsTrack citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInEmailWeChat Dr. Kenneth R. Spring has been named the 2006 recipient of the Robert W. Berliner Award for Excellence in Renal Physiology, sponsored by Abbott Laboratories and presented by the Renal Section of the American Physiological Society. Dr. Spring will receive the award at the Renal Dinner on Tuesday, April 4, 2006.Dr. Spring attended Tufts University as both an undergraduate in Biology and for dental school, earning his DMD cum laude in 1966. He worked at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Hospital in Long Beach, California, from 1966 to 1967 and at the VA Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from 1967 to 1968, where he was a Chief Investigator. He then attended the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he completed his PhD in the Department of Physiology in 1971 under the supervision of Dr. Charles Paganelli. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Gerhard Giebisch in the Department of Physiology, Yale University College of Medicine, from 1971 to 1975, he accepted a position as a Senior Staff Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Laboratory of Kidney and Electrolyte Metabolism. He became a Research Physiologist at the NIH in 1978. He received the NIH Director’s Award in 1988 and was also made Chief, Section on Transport Physiology, at the Laboratory of Kidney and Electrolyte Metabolism in 1988, a position he held until he retired in 2002. In 2001 he received an NIH Merit Award.Dr. Spring is a world-recognized expert on microscopy applications to biological systems, as well as being an inventor of many ingenious devices used worldwide for biological research. He has published over a 130 peer-reviewed manuscripts on the use and application of these techniques to the study of transport physiology. His research focused on the study of salt and water transport in “leaky epithelia,” such as the renal proximal tubule; then, he switched his emphasis to applying optical methods to the regulation of cell volume, and finally, before he retired, demonstrated the functional role of the central cilium as a flow sensor in epithelial cells by performing experiments that demonstrated how bending the cilium increased intracellular calcium. During these years of research, he has trained numerous young scientists who have become leaders in the field of ion transport physiology and was always willing to share his expertise in microscopy with investigators from across the world.Dr. Spring was also a faculty member at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, from 1980 until he retired, teaching courses on quantitative light microscopy and advanced quantitative light microscopy. Dr. Spring served on several study sections, advisory committees, and editorial boards, including those of the Journal of Membrane Biology and Cytology (formerly Bioimaging), of which he was also associate editor from 1992 to 2002, the NIH Shared Instrumentation Study Section, and the National Science Foundation Biological Instrumentation and Instrument Development Study Section. Finally, in 2001 he authored a very funny book of autobiographical short stories, What Were You Thinking, which detailed his escapades growing up in a fishing village in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Following retirement he went back to his first love of fishing and boat-building; he is now the part-owner and founder of Small Open Boats in Solomons, Maryland, where he builds wooden boats and provides tools, materials, and expertise for others to do the same.The APS Renal Section’s Berliner Award Committee was composed of Heddwen L. Brooks (Renal Section Awards Chair); Pamela K. Carmines (Renal Section Chair), Jeff M. Sands (Editor, American Journal of Physiology-Renal Physiology), and Glenn Reinhart (Abbott Laboratories). Download figureDownload PowerPointThis article has no references to display. Download PDF Previous Back to Top FiguresReferencesRelatedInformation More from this issue > Volume 290Issue 5May 2006Pages F1278-F1278 Copyright & PermissionsCopyright © 2006 the American Physiological Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1152/ajprenal.00018.2006History Published online 1 May 2006 Published in print 1 May 2006 Metrics

Arterial Aneurysms: a Historical Review

The story of aneurysms goes back a long way. There are traces of them (albeit rather uncertain) to be found in Egyptian tombs, and the ancient Greeks and Romans certainly recognized the lethal nature of a swelling that pulsated in time with the heart and how important it was to distinguish such bumps from abscesses which could be cured by simple incision. In ancient times aneurysms usually resulted from trauma, and would nowadays be called false aneurysms because they did not involve the entire arterial wall. Some were caused by war wounds but many followed clumsy venesection, when the brachial artery was punctured rather than the adjacent vein. From the fifteenth century onwards the picture changed because of the arrival from the New World of syphilis, which leads to weakening of the arterial wall. It took a long time for the connection between venereal disease and aneurysm to be admitted, largely because of the reluctance of clinicians to connect anatomical lesions, particularly in their more influential patients, with sexual behaviour. From the very earliest days it was known that these lesions could not safely be left alone. Not only were they often very painful, but enlargement and eventual rupture always followed. Treatments included external compression through many ingenious devices, application of unguents and potions, and various eccentric diets. Surgery was kept as a last resort, because it was hardly ever successful. Ligation of the feeding vessels was the standard procedure, but all too often the aneurysm continued to enlarge through collateral channels, or else the arterial supply to a limb failed and gangrene followed. The different patterns of ligation suggested by, among others, John and William Hunter were well thought out but difficult to execute because a quick operation on a conscious patient made precision impossible. Even in the best hands mistakes were frequent, as when Robert Knox gloatingly described to his Edinburgh students how his rival the eminent surgeon Robert Liston had that very morning 'plunged his knife into what he foolishly imagined to be an abscess, and with blood gushing forth from the aneurismal sac, the patient was dead within a few seconds'. For many surgeons, primary amputation, as advised by Percival Pott, seemed the safest option. With the arrival of general anaesthesia, surgeons could work in a deliberate and careful manner, observing and following the anatomy. Various attempts at reconstructive surgery culminated in the 1920s in the work of Rudolfo Matas, whose 'endoaneurysmorrhaphy', which involved sewing the aneurysmal sac from within, remained the standard procedure for many years. During the twentieth century, syphilis declined as the main pathology, to be replaced by degenerative arterial disease including atherosclerosis. Dramatic improvements in imaging techniques, from arteriography to CT and MRI, enabled the surgeon to plan the approach, and at the same time, metabolic care of the surgical patient made complex and prolonged interventions safer. The commonest and most lethal form of aneurysm was now that of the abdominal aorta. Reconstruction of this lesion, and of complex aneurysms involving the chest, became a safe routine procedure, and the results of emergency surgery for ruptured aneurysm steadily improved. Nonetheless, open repair remained a formidable operation for these patients who were usually elderly and had extensive comorbidity, and an alternative procedure was needed. Parodi's introduction in the late 1990s of endovascular repair (EVAR), by which a prosthesis is guided into the aorta via the femoral artery, producing a new narrow channel while the retained sac is allowed to collapse and thrombose around it, has transformed the management. Certainly EVAR is not the final answer, and problems and complications remain to be resolved, but Parodi's initiative points the way forward. Raphael Suy, a distinguished vascular surgeon from the University of Leuven, has had a personal as well as a professional interest in the aneurysm story, and his beautifully produced and illustrated book relates it in elegant form. The scholarship is profound and this must remain the authoritative work of reference for the foreseeable future

Assessing the Past and Shaping the Future of Anesthesiology

Assessing the Past and Shaping the Future of Anesthesiology

Technologies that make administration of vaccines safer

There is an ever-expanding technology that is aimed at making the administration of vaccines safer. Conventional ways of administering vaccines are being upgraded, modified or replaced by a wide variety of innovations. The paradigm of liquid vaccines, needles and syringes is slow to change, but already developments are ocurring that will change for ever the way vaccines are administered and will improve the safety record of immunization. The oral route of vaccine administration has generally been thought of as safe, but until now only the polio vaccine has been widely used in this way. The conventional method of vaccine administration is by injection. Many ingenious devices have become available that now make injecting safer. Inventors are now looking imaginatively to alternative routes and technologies for delivering vaccines. Vaccines are genreally manufactured to extremely high standards and rarely are shown to be the cause of safety issues. People remain the weakest safety link is vaccine administration. Technologies that bypasses the ability of man to make bad decisions or to behave incorrectly are of tremendous value. The vaccine world is in the middle of a radical re-think about how vaccines might best be administered. The presentation of the vaccine can be altered to fit new technologies such as powder jet guns, or skin patches. Even the conventional needle and syringe have evolved to much safer versions, and are set to continue this evolution. All this means even safer vaccines and their delivery.

EXPERIMENTAL AND MATHEMATICAL EVALUATION OF DYNAMIC BEHAVIOUR OF AN OIL-AIR COUPLING SHOCK ABSORBER

The physical mechanism of the actual shock absorber with multi-types of damping and non-linear stiffness through coupling the oil, air, rubber and spring by ingenious devices is systematically investigated. The experimental results of the key-model machine in multi-parameter coupling dynamic test show complex non-linearity dynamic characteristics. Based on this, the non-linear dynamic model for the shock absorber is presented by analysing the internal fluid dynamic phenomenon with respect to the shock absorber. Comparisons with experimental data confirm the validity of the model. Using the model, it is possible to evaluate the importance of different factors for designing the shock absorber.

The Past 50 Years of Cardiovascular Surgery

The Past 50 Years of Cardiovascular Surgery

Developing surgical techniques in cochlear implantation

Since Djourno and Eyries described their first experience of electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve in 1957, the journey to an easily insertable, reliable and effective cochlear implant has been one of the most exciting in the history of medicine. The hallmark of the venture has been global collaboration between basic scientists in many fields – bioengineering, microcircuitry, signal processing, cognitive science and linguistics – as well as surgeons and educationalists. Many ingenious devices have been developed and equally ingenious operations have been proposed in order to maximize their effectiveness and minimize their potential damage to the inner ear. Complicated extracochlear devices eventually gave way to intracochlear multichannel implants, and surgical challenges such as paediatric implantation, ossification, CSOM and dysplasia were addressed and solutions found. The journey is not yet over, however, and progress continues to be made to develop a fully implantable cochlear implant, which should be a reality within five years.

Developing surgical techniques in cochlear implantation

Since Djourno and Eyries described their first experience of electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve in 1957, the journey to an easily insertable, reliable and effective cochlear implant has been one of the most exciting in the history of medicine. The hallmark of the venture has been global collaboration between basic scientists in many fields – bioengineering, microcircuitry, signal processing, cognitive science and linguistics – as well as surgeons and educationalists. Many ingenious devices have been developed and equally ingenious operations have been proposed in order to maximize their effectiveness and minimize their potential damage to the inner ear. Complicated extracochlear devices eventually gave way to intracochlear multichannel implants, and surgical challenges such as paediatric implantation, ossification, CSOM and dysplasia were addressed and solutions found. The journey is not yet over, however, and progress continues to be made to develop a fully implantable cochlear implant, which should be a reality within five years.

Epidemiology and the World Wide Web: is there a 'net benefit?

In the early 1960s, practical epidemiology began to come under the influence of computing power. Before that time, epidemiologists had used ingenious devices such as the edge-punched card and hand-driven and even electrically driven calculating machines, all dependent on well known technology ingeniously applied. Regression analysis of study data was essentially unknown because the inversion of matrices beyond 3 x 3 by hand was far too time-consuming or well nigh impossible. Looking toward the future at that time, one would never have envisaged what in fact has taken place over the last 40 years. Large mainframes housed in dedicated buildings beckoned research workers to their halls so that jobs could be delivered to the technical staff as a roll of punched paper tape or a pile of punched cards. Paper tape was quickly discarded, as mistakes in keying the information onto the tape required remaking the tape or troublesome splicing. The IBM punch card allowed corrections to be made more easily, as replacement cards could be quickly inserted into the original deck. An industry grew up to produce heavy electromechanical machinery to record the input data. Magnetic tape, read on machines occupying the space of several filing cabinets, ensured consistency of input of a data set from one analysis to the next, but it was not convenient for storing programs likely to be modified from one run to another. There were few generalized programs suitable for analysis of epidemiologic data, so researchers tended to write their own. The time and effort spent on preparing and verifying data input, writing bespoke programs, and traveling between laboratory and computer center were considerable. At that time, it was obvious what was needed to reduce the

The Endless Reading of Fiction: Stuart Moulthrop's Hypertext Novel "Victory Garden"

T~ he literary form for computer known as hypertext fiction requires unusually repetitive readings, clickings, and scannings to interpret its often-repetitive patterns of screens and yet, at least up to a point, its even-more-often changing ones. Consequently, a hypertext novel such as Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden (1991) not only propels us into exploring and reexploring more than a hundred pathways-most of them filled with a large number of episodes-but also rewards us with the altered perspectives of frequently changing combinations and orders. In this essay, I shall use a reader-response approach to illustrate the rewards for someone who sticks to this hypertext task of long duration. First I'll examine the challenge of gaining a view of the novel as a whole when the work, in fact, will not hold still. Then I'll attempt a close reading of just a single sequence to show how it also requires of us many rereadings simply because it comes up in pieces of varying orders, combinations, and lengths. Ultimately, though, in spite of Victory Garden's seemingly endless and renewable complexity, I will need to examine at this essay's close the kind of sadness that I for one felt when this hypertext novel's fresh nuances of discovery ceased at last to hold my attention. Of course, the reader's need for many explorations arises, first of all, from an intrinsic complexity in the hypertext software itself-its capacity for a large number of pathways and links as well as its ingenious devices for concealment. If we took a traditional novel such as

The history of physical acoustics: The worldwide scene

The term physical acoustics, used by von Helmholtz in his book in 1862 to distinguish the subject from physiological acoustics and music, did not become popular until after World War II. The term covers the production, transmission, and reception of sound, as well as the interaction of sound with matter. With such a broad definition, we shall be able here to delineate only a few major threads. The production of sound moved in the early nineteenth century from musical instruments, explosions, and the human voice, to the ingenious devices of Helmholtz, into the field of ultrasonics through the work of the Curie brothers, and into underwater sound from the researches of Boyle and Langevin. The attenuation of sound includes the theoretical work of Stokes and Kirchhoff, the experiments of Neklepaev, the further theory of Einstein, and the experiments of Kneser. Nonlinear acoustics began with the theories of Poisson and Riemann, was pushed along by Rayleigh, and developed in this century by Fubini, Lighthill, and Khoklov. The optical effect, discovered by Debye and, independently, by Lucas and Biquard, received its theoretical basis in the work of Raman and Nath, and was confirmed in detail experimentally by Nomoto.

Métaphysique et science politique les intelligibles volotaires dans leTaḥṣīl al-sa'ādad'al-Fārābī

This study, limited toKitāb Taḥṣīl al-sa'āda, examines two points: the first point concerns the place of political science in the hierarchy of the sciences and its dependence on Metaphysics. This dependence gives it a theoretical status and a proper subject, namely voluntary intelligibles which appear as objective entities and stable essences. The second point to be examined concerns these intelligibles, considered in their relationship to deliberation. From this viewpoint, they appear as formal invariants open to different formulations which correspond to different modes of existence. These formulations are also formal rules to the realisation of intelligibles, and though they are more or less general, they are not universal. They are objects for deliberative discovery and the model of deliberative operations seems similar to the model of ingeniosity present in Algebra and the arts of ingenious devices.

Rolf Wideröe and the Development of Particle Accelerators

The development of particle accelerators is traced from the simple but ingenious table-top devices conceived during the late 1920s to the present day's large, complex machines which extend over tens of kilometers. The emphasis is on Rolf Wideröe and his seminal contributions to the field. Not only did Wideröe construct the first accelerator which accelerated charged particles to an energy higher than the maximum voltage difference is the accelerator proper, he also invented particle colliders, today's work horse in experimental particle physics.

Heritage of the tissue-bed oximeter.

The pulse oximeter is well established in clinical medicine as a monitor of the efficacy of the cardiorespiratory system. The principle of this device represents the end of a long evolutionary line of noninvasive instruments designed to measure the redness of blood i.e. oxygen saturation. This historical note describes the many ingenious devices that are the heritage of the pulse oximeter, which was described by Nakajima et al. (1979) and Yoshiya et al. (1980).

Schematic Politics

Can philosophically inclined political scientists, as well as quantifying behavioralists, use diagrams? Of course … and have at least since Plato depicted Socrates drawing lines in the sand below the walls of Athens. Nothing will more quickly or comprehensively convey the relationships between the elements within a complex idea than a carefully constructed, skillfully rendered schematic diagram.A few years back, I published a book on American politics (Roelofs 1992b). Some readers found it interesting, but others seemed unable to credit—much less to critique— its central claim: to have presented a detailed, integrated, and comprehensive account of the American political system as a conceptual whole. Apparently, for these readers, my argument was so extended, the elements to be connected within it so numerous (and sometimes individually so strange), they simply lost sight of my overall intent.In a phenomenological perspective, the American political system, viewed comprehensively, is an Idea, extraordinarily complex, and filled with ingenious devices as well as major contradictions and paradoxes. Yet it is still a single system, as the diagram I have now developed to illustrate the argument of my book (Figure 1) attempts to show.

Schematic Politics

Can philosophically inclined political scientists, as well as quantifying behavioralists, use diagrams? Of course … and have at least since Plato depicted Socrates drawing lines in the sand below the walls of Athens. Nothing will more quickly or comprehensively convey the relationships between the elements within a complex idea than a carefully constructed, skillfully rendered schematic diagram.A few years back, I published a book on American politics (Roelofs 1992b). Some readers found it interesting, but others seemed unable to credit—much less to critique— its central claim: to have presented a detailed, integrated, and comprehensive account of the American political system as a conceptual whole. Apparently, for these readers, my argument was so extended, the elements to be connected within it so numerous (and sometimes individually so strange), they simply lost sight of my overall intent.In a phenomenological perspective, the American political system, viewed comprehensively, is an Idea, extraordinarily complex, and filled with ingenious devices as well as major contradictions and paradoxes. Yet it is still a single system, as the diagram I have now developed to illustrate the argument of my book (Figure 1) attempts to show.

Molecular microscopy: Theoretical possibilities and experimental realities

It is interesting to imagine a world in which microscopy had never been invented. What techniques would scientists use to study cell structure? Lack of microscopy would not prevent research.... instead scientists would study cells using indirect means; e.g. by homogenizing, filtering, and centrifuging cells. After much work, they would be able to demonstrate that cells are surrounded by membranes, and contain nuclei carrying genetic information. All aspects of cell structure could be studied in this indirect way.Biomedical researchers would not feel particularly handicapped by the lack of microscopy. Rather they would compete for access to the newest and most ingenious filtering devices. In this hypothetical world, it would not be readily apparent that instrument technology was a crucial medical/scientific issue.It is arguably the case that we live in a similar world, and that (from a clinical perspective) we need a microscope technology that can image 3D biomolecular structure with the subangstrom spatial resolution that is required for the rational design of drugs and vaccines.The highest-resolution techniques for determining 3D molecular structure are x-ray crystallography and mutidimensional NMR analysis. However, neither of these techniques can properly be called “microscopy”.

Base Isolation: Linear Theory and Design

The idea that a building can be uncoupled from the damaging effects of the ground movement produced by a strong earthquake has appealed to inventors and engineers for more than a century. Many ingenious devices have been proposed to achieve this result, but very few have been implemented and the concept now referred to as base isolation or seismic isolation has yet to be generally accepted by the engineering profession. Although most of the proposed systems are unacceptably complicated, in recent years a few practical systems have been developed and implemented. While some of these systems have been tested on large-scale shaking tables, none have to date been tested as-built by a strong earth tremor. The shake table testing and related static testing of full-scale components such as isolation bearings, however, has led to a certain degree of acceptance by the profession and it is possible that the number of practical implementations of base isolation will increase quite dramatically in the next few years. This paper describes recent implementations of base isolation and describes an approximate linear theory of isolation which can be used for the design of base isolation systems that use multilayer elastomeric isolators.