Pre Filter Research Articles

A New Blood Module for Continuous Renal Replacement Therapies

A new blood module for continuous renal replacement therapies has been utilized to perform CVVH in critically ill patients. The features of the new module named (HP300 and manufactured by Medica srl (Medolla, Modena) are the easy installation and transportability to the bedside, the simple and safe management and the continuous measurement of the pre and post filter pressure with automatic calculation of the end-to-end pressure drop inside the filter. The last feature permits to detect early malfunctions of the filter due to fibers clotting or due to the internal coating of the hollow fibers by plasma proteins. In both cases the efficiency of the treatment can be reduced because of a significant reduction of the ultrafiltration rates or a remarkable decay of the membrane permeability and solute sieving coefficients. In many cases this reduction is only detected when important effects on solute removal have already occurred. In our experience, the new module permitted the substitution of the filters when early malfunctions were detected and maximal treatment efficiency was therefore guaranteed over extended periods of time.

Features and Performance of 12PM3 Modulation Methods for Digital Land Mobile Radio

A number of continuous-phase modulation methods suitable for digital and mobile radio applications has been grouped in a common class, which has been named 12PM3 (12-state, phase modulation with correlation over three consecutive bits). This paper introduces the definition of this class of modulation schemes, and presents some of its features. With reference to the scheme that gives the best spectral compactness, some effects of typical implementation imperfections of the modulation circuits are discussed. The performance of some 12PM3 modulators associated with a frequency discrimination receiver is then computed with reference to both AWGN (additive white Gaussian noise) channels and the typical propagation conditions envisaged for SCPC/FDMA digital land mobile radio systems in urban environment. The adopted pre and postdiscrimination filters of the receiver are optimized for the best performance. Different decision techniques are considered, namely 2-TH (2-threshold), 4-TH, mixed 2-TH/4-TH and MLSE (maximum-likelihood sequence estimation) techniques.

The Influence of Diffraction and Dispersion on the Fidelity of Degenerate Convolution

Both diffraction and dispersion degrade the signal processing fidelity of acoustic surface wave (ASW) convolvers. It is shown that both effects can be simulated on a model convolver by means of linear passive pre or post-distortion filters. In practice, a degree of compensation can be achieved by using inverse networks. Emphasis is placed on deriving design formulas that allow distortion levels to be estimated without extensive computation. Distortion network characteristics required are related to convolver layout. A number of typical design examples are considered.