The plasmodium of the true slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, which shows various nonlinear oscillatory phenomena, for example, in its thickness, protoplasmic streaming and concentration of intracellular chemicals, can be regarded as a collective of nonlinear oscillators. The plasmodial oscillators are interconnected by microscale tubes whose dimensions can be closely related to the strength of...

Fill-front and cure progress monitoring is critical for vacuum-assisted resin transfer molding (VARTM) manufacturing processes. The experimental multi-channel system presented in this paper includes sensors, signal conditioning, data acquisition software, and signal post-processing components. The sensors are mechanically flexible and optically transparent fringing electric field electrode syst...

The mold design/manufacturing plays a crucial role in the development of high-volume mold-injected, pressed, and/or formed products. A mold fabrication consists of a set of sub-processes and usually takes several months to complete its design and production. Due to the shortening of product lifecycle, the sequence of process execution has to be reengineered to improve its efficiency. This resea...

Electroformed microfluidic chip mold faces the problem of uneven thickness, which decreases the dimensional accuracy of the mold, and increases the production cost. To fabricate a mold with uniform thickness, two methods are investigated. Firstly, experiments are carried out to study how the ultrasonic agitation affects the thickness uniformity of the mold. It is found that the thickness unifor...

A numerical technique is developed to determine the three-dimensional fiber orientation in complex flows. The fiber orientation state is specified in terms of orientation tensors, which are used in several constitutive models. This method is applied to quasi-steady state Hele-Shaw flows in order to predict the flowinduced fiber orientation during injection molding at zero volume fraction limit....

A DNA extraction system was designed and fabricated using an AOM (aluminum oxide membrane) with 200 nm pores and PDMS microfluidic channels. The membrane was patterned using soft lithography techniques and SU-8 photolithography on the membrane. After making the pattern with SU-8, the AOM was observed using an SEM (scanning electro microscope) to verify the AOM structure was not damaged. From th...

BACKGROUND When the federal levee system broke after Hurricane Katrina, 80 percent of New Orleans, approximately 134,000 homes, flooded. As repopulation and revitalization activities continue, exposure to mold and other respiratory irritants has emerged as a major health concern; however, there has been no study examining children's respiratory health and indoor mold levels in the post-Katrina ...

The objectives in this work were to develop, calibrate, and apply a model to predict ideal taper profiles down the narrow faces of the SIDERAR slab casting mold for several different casting speeds, steel grades, flux powder compositions, and widths. A significant amount of original research was undertaken for this challenging problem. A finite difference model of transient 1-D heat conduction ...