BACKGROUND The traditional nasal cannula with bubble humidifier is limited to a maximum flow of 6 L/min to minimize the risk of complications. We conducted a bench study of 2 new Food and Drug Administration-approved nasal cannula/humidifier products designed to deliver at flows> 6 L/min. METHODS Using a digital psychrometer we measured the relative humidity and temperature of delivered gas f...

A new approach for developing optochemical absorbance sensors is presented. The method is based on a planar micro-optic circuit in which an optochemically active membrane that responds to selective compounds is deposited in the device, yielding a part of the guiding planar structure. In this way the optical field is confined in the direction transverse to the substrate and controlled in the lat...

Fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) is a single molecule technique used mainly for determination of mobility and local concentration of molecules. This review describes the specific problems of FCS in planar systems and reviews the state of the art experimental approaches such as 2-focus, Z-scan or scanning FCS, which overcome most of the artefacts and limitations of standard FCS. We fo...

An optimal combination of the characteristics of an air conditioning system and the control strategy is necessary to minimize costs and the energy demand. Therefore a sequential control for such a system was developed, tested by simulation and implemented in an existing plant. The simulation runs have been done with TRNSYS [1],[2]. For the sake of comparison, an optimized control was calculated...

An ion-gated channel was conferred on a planar lipid bilayer membrane upon incorporation of (Na+,K+)-ATPase. The channel exhibited two conductance states. The high conductance state was only observed when an ion gradient was present across the planar membrane. This state corresponded to an enzyme conformation which was ouabain and vanadate sensitive (i.e. conductance was inhibited by these comp...