Contractile properties and conduction velocity were studied in 202 single motor units of intact rat triceps surae muscles activated by intra-axonal (or intra-myelin) current injection in L5 or L6 ventral root to assess the factors that determine the expression of sag (i.e., decline in force after initial increase during unfused tetanic stimulation). Sag was consistently detected in motor units ...

One of the major challenges in petroleum industry is producing residual oil from underground. One of the major techniques for enhancing oil recovery (EOR) is using gas injection. However, gas has poor volumetric sweep efficiency, this is attributed to its high mobility which considers to be higher compared with oil and water mobility. Several techniques are proposed and applied for reducing gas...

Custom Power devices like Dynamic voltage restorer and STATCOM are normally employed as a solution for mitigation of power quality problems like voltage sag and swell. In this paper new voltage sag compensators based on an autotransformer and an IGBT switched by PWM technique and Hysteresis Voltage Control (HVC) method are compared. These two schemes are able to recognize the voltage sag condit...

Leakage of plasma proteins into the alveoli inhibits pulmonary surfactant function and worsens respiratory failure. Surfactant protein B (SP-B), is essential for surfactant function, but the N-terminal domain of human SP-B (residues 1.25, SP-B1-25) can mimic the biophysical properties of full length SP-B1-78 in vitro. The authors compared the function and inhibition resistance of synthetic surf...

SAG (salivary agglutinin), which is identical to gp-340 (glycoprotein-340) from the lung, is encoded by DMBT1 (deleted in malignant brain tumours 1). It is a member of the SRCR (scavenger receptor cysteine-rich) superfamily and contains 14 SRCR domains, 13 of which are highly similar. SAG in saliva is partially complexed with IgA, which may be necessary for bacterial binding. The goal of the pr...

We studied the effects of administering exogenous surfactant for the treatment of respiratory distress in premature neonates (born before 37 weeks of gestational age [GA]) and compared the role of different risk factors on the outcome as well as survival rate. All the neonates (242) suffered from moderate to severe respiratory distress, identified by clinical signs, chest X-ray, respiratory dis...

We investigate the validity of the assumption that foam in porous media reduces the mobility of gas phase only and does not impact the liquid-phase mobility. The foam is generated by simultaneous injection of nitrogen gas and a surfactant solution into sandstone cores and its strength is varied by changing surfactant type and concentration. We find, indeed, that the effect of foam on liquid-pha...

We apply adjoint-based optimization to a Surfactant-Alternating-Gas foam process using a linear foam model introducing gradual changes in gas mobility and a nonlinear foam model giving abrupt changes in gas mobility as function of oil and water saturations and surfactant concentration. For the linear foam model, the objective function is a relatively smooth function of the switching time. For t...

BACKGROUND The effect of gas bubbles on platelet behavior is poorly characterized. The authors assessed platelet-bubble and platelet-platelet binding in platelet-rich plasma in the presence and absence of bubbles and three surface-active compounds. METHODS Platelet-rich plasma was prepared from blood drawn from 16 volunteers. Experimental groups were surfactant alone, sparging (microbubble em...

We have compared the effects of inhalation of aerosolized surfactant on experimental acute respiratory distress syndrome. Escherichia coli endotoxin (55 (SD 20) mg kg(-1)) was injected into the tracheas of 36 adult rats anaesthetized and mechanically ventilated with pure oxygen. When the Pa(O(2)) decreased to 11.3 (3.3) kPa, the animals were randomly subjected to inhalation of aerosolized modif...