INTRODUCTION The main advantage of superelastic nickel-titanium (NiTi) products is their unique characteristic of force plateaus, which allow for clinically precise control of the force. The aims of this study were to define the mechanical characteristics of several currently available closed-coil retraction springs and to compare these products. METHODS A universal test frame was used to acq...

  Chi-Cheng Cheng and Jiun-Hung Chen   Department of Mechanical and Electro-Mechanical Engineering, National Sun Yat-Sen University, 70 Lian-Hai Road, Kaohsiung Taiwan 80424, Republic of China     Abstract: Telemanipulation is usually provided with the force-reflective feature to give human operators information about the remote site. However, oscillations can always been found in conta...

The graphene nano-electro-mechanical switches are promising components due to their outstanding switching performance. However, most of the reported devices suffered from a large actuation voltages, hindering them from the integration in the conventional complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) circuit. In this work, we demonstrated the graphene nano-electro-mechanical switches with the l...

Patient-ventilator interaction is a key element in optimizing mechanical ventilation. The change from inspiration to expiration is a crucial point in the mechanically ventilated breath, and is termed "cycling." Patient-ventilator asynchrony may occur if the flow at which the ventilator cycles to exhalation does not coincide with the termination of neural inspiration. Ideally, the ventilator ter...

A major goal in earthquake physics is to derive a constitutive framework for fault slip that captures the dependence of shear strength on rheology, sliding velocity, and pore-fluid pressure. In this study, we present H-MEC (Hydro-Mechanical Earthquake Cycles), newly-developed two-phase flow numerical — which couples solid rock deformation pervasive fluid simulate how crustal stress pressure evo...

BACKGROUND Previous in vivo data suggest that high airway resistance (R(aw)) promotes dynamic hyperinflation, especially when coupled to high minute ventilation (V(E)). However, no studies have systematically examined the relative effects of various mechanical parameters on dynamic hyperinflation. METHODS Intrinsic positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEPi) was measured with a ventilator-lung m...