BACKGROUND Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is a systemic chronic inflammatory disease. Studies using tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) for the evaluation of cardiac functions of children with JIA are limited. Thus, this study was conducted to evaluate Left ventricular function, left atrial mechanical functions and atrial electromechanical delay in JIA. METHODS This study was carried out as a a...

This paper deals with the bending of layered piezoelectric beams (multimorphs) subjected to arbitrary electrical and mechanical loading. Weinberg [1] obtaind a closed-form solution to this problem using Euler–Bernoulli beam theory and integrated equilibrium equations. In his analysis, Weinberg assumes that the electric field is constant through the thickness of the piezoelectric layers. This ap...

Abstract: Electromechanical coupling defines the ratio of electrical and mechanical energy exchanged during a flexure cycle of a piezoelectric actuator. This paper presents an analysis of the dynamic electromechanical coupling factor (dynamic EMCF) for cantilever based piezoelectric actuators and provides for the first time explicit expressions for calculation of dynamic EMCF based on arrangeme...

Skeletal myoblasts form grafts of mature muscle in injured hearts, and these grafts contract when exogenously stimulated. It is not known, however, whether cardiac muscle can form electromechanical junctions with skeletal muscle and induce its synchronous contraction. Here, we report that undifferentiated rat skeletal myoblasts expressed N-cadherin and connexin43, major adhesion and gap junctio...

In the present paper, electrical energy harvesting from random vibrations of an Euler-Bernoulli nano-beam with two piezoelectric layers is investigated. The beam is composed of an aluminum layer together with two piezoelectric ceramic layers (PZT 5A) serving as energy harvesting sensors. In the proposed method, the equations governing the bimorph nano-beam will be analytically derived using cla...

The tubular fibers of the claw-closer muscle of the scorpion have a central core containing nuclei and mitochondria. The myofibrils have the shape of thin lamellae (1 micro) extending radially from the core to the surface membrane (20 micro). The thick myofilaments are organized in a hexagonal array with orbits of 10-13 thin myofilaments. The ratio of thick-to-thin filaments is 1:5. Transverse ...

We present a multi-scale modelling framework to predict the effective electromechanical behavior of ferroelectric ceramics and thin films. This paper specifically focuses on the mesoscopic scale and models the effects of domains and domain switching taking into account intergranular constraints. Starting from the properties of the single crystal and the pre-poling granular texture, the theory p...

High sensitivity magnetoelectric sensors with their electromechanical resonance frequencies < 200 kHz have been recently demonstrated using magnetostrictive/piezoelectric magnetoelectric heterostructures. In this work, we demonstrate a novel magnetoelectric nano-electromechanical systems (NEMS) resonator with an electromechanical resonance frequency of 215 MHz based on an AlN/(FeGaB/Al2O3) × 10...