Positek Limited L6 The Link Andoversford Industrial Estate Andoversford Cheltenham Gloucestershire GL54 4LB England Telephone (44) (0)1242 820027 Fax: (44) (0)1242 820615 Abstract With the increasing sophistication of electronic controls for mechanical systems to provide both accuracy and flexibility of control, there is more demand for durable, accurate and easy to use displacement sensors. Cu...

Nucleic acids are excellent building blocks to enable switchable character in supramolecular polymer materials because of their inherent dynamic character and potential for orthogonal self-assembly. Herein, DNA-grafted squaramide bola-amphiphiles are used in a multicomponent supramolecular polymer system and it is shown that they can be addressed by DNAlabeled gold nanoparticles (5 and 15 nm) t...

lateral and anterior displacements of mandible may cause malocclusion. the aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of these displacements in a population of 597 childrens age 12 in mashhad secondary schools. displacment of mandible was shown to be in 11.8 percent of the population (6.2 percent anterior and 5.6 percent lateral displacement).anterior displacement of mandible was diagnos...

Displacement-based seismic design and assessment procedures require as key input parameter estimates of displacement capacities of the critical elements. The displacement capacities of unreinforced masonry (URM) walls are typically determined by means of quasistatic cyclic tests. This paper shows that for URM walls failing in shear the number of applied cycles in quasi-static cyclic tests influ...

Piezoelectric meso- and microactuator systems required for manipulation or assembly of microscale objects demand reliable force and/or displacement information. Available sensors are prone to dimension restrictions or precision limitation. Self-sensing method, based on the electric charge measurement, may represent a solution in terms of cost-effectiveness and integration, the actuator performi...

One of the most important components in hydraulic circuits is the pump that generates hydraulic power supply. The performance and the versatility of a variable displacement piston pump are, to a large extent, determined by its controller. Upgrading of existing controllers is considered one of the major means of improving the characteristics of the pump. The dynamic performance of hydraulic syst...

Comprehensive identification of the acquired mutations that cause common cancers will require genomic analyses of large sets of tumor samples. Typically, the tissue material available from tumor specimens is limited, which creates a demand for accurate template amplification. We therefore evaluated whether phi29-mediated whole genome amplification introduces false positive structural mutations ...

A piezoelectric dispenser has been fabricated based on the idea of a piezoelectric-metal-cavity (PMC) actuator. The PMC actuator consists of a metal ring sandwiched between two identical piezoelectric unimorphs. The radial contraction of the piezoelectric ceramic is converted into a flextensional motion of the unimorph, causing a large flexural displacement in the center part of the actuator. W...

The main objective of this article is to assess the expected seismic damage in reinforced concrete buildings from a probabilistic point of view by using Monte Carlo simulation. To do that, the seismic behavior of the building is studied by using random capacity obtained by considering the mechanical properties of the materials as random variables. Starting from the capacity curves, one can obta...

Both educational expenditures and attainment have increased sharply over the last decades, despite rising prices of education, and stagnating income returns to human capital. This paper emphasizes conditional employment risks hedging as additional motivation for education demand. Job risk diversification through education is strongly evidenced in the data, yet is absent from the Human Capital (...