Porous dielectric materials, such as SiOCH, are used as the insulator in interconnect wiring in microelectronics devices to lower the dielectric constant and so decrease the RC time delay. Sealing of the pores (up to a few nm in diameter) is necessary to prevent degradation of the low-k properties during subsequent processing steps by diffusion of reactants through the pores into the material. ...

This paper describes two recent applications of aerosol sealing techniques in buildings for improving indoor air quality and reducing energy required for heating, cooling, and ventilation. One application applies a commercially-available duct sealing technology, which has typically been used in single-family applications, to large-building exhaust systems. The initial leakage rates, percent lea...

This study aimed to examine clinical effect of vacuum sealing drainage in treating the wound tissue of patients with diabetes; and investigate the expression of periostin and connective tissue growth factor in wound tissue. We selected 40 patients with diabetes and chronic ulcers, and assigned randomly into two groups: the vacuum sealing drainage group and routine dressing group (controls). Tis...

Bone degradation by osteoclasts depends on the formation of a sealing zone, composed of an interlinked network of podosomes, which delimits the degradation lacuna into which osteoclasts secrete acid and proteolytic enzymes. For resorption to occur, the sealing zone must be coherent and stable for extended periods of time. Using titanium roughness gradients ranging from 1 to 4.5 µm R(a) as subst...

In industrial assembly lines, seam sealing is a painting process used for making watertight seals or for preventing rusting. In the process, sealant is painted on seams located at the joints of pressed metal parts. We developed a sealing robot system that adjusts the sealing gun motion adaptively to the seam position sensed by a range sensor (a scanning laser rangefinder which senses profile ra...

A variety of seals is used to close bags. Each seal has advantages and disadvantages. For shop assistants sealing bags could be a repetitive physically demanding action. Opening and closing the bags again can cause some discomfort or annoyance for consumers. Besides, it is an activity which can endanger safety, i.e., knives being used in opening, children swallowing the systems of sealing. To p...

We construct spectral triples and, in particular, Dirac operators, for the algebra of continuous functions on certain compact metric spaces. The triples are countable sums of triples where each summand is based on a curve in the space. Several fractals, like a finitely summable infinite tree and the Sierpinski gasket, fit naturally within our framework. In these cases, we show that our spectral...