The present work focuses on a detailed analysis of new and used braking friction partners (discs pads) in order to provide comprehensive characterization the source airborne particles formed during braking. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) combined with energy dispersive X-Ray (EDX) was applied investigate brake disc pad components passenger vehicle. pads include at least 21 different substan...

In system synthesis, one needs to derive from a given set of processes a system design which reflects exactly the functionalities of the processes and is free from erroneous situations such as deadlock and capacity overflow. This is especially important for shared-resource systems, in which errors are easily induced because of the sharing of common resources among different competing processes....

The efficacy of self-adhesive electrode pads for defibrillation and cardioversion was assessed in 80 patients who received 267 shocks from self-adhesive pads. In all but two patients, defibrillation or cardioversion was achieved at least once. The pads were equally effective when used in the apex-anterior or apex-posterior position. The transthoracic impedance using self-adhesive pads was 75 +/...

Insects possess adhesive organs that allow attachment to diverse surfaces. Efficient adhesion must be retained throughout their lifetime even when pads are exposed to contamination. Many insects groom their adhesive structures, but it is possible that self-cleaning properties also play an important role. We measured attachment forces of insect pads on glass after contamination with microspheres...

Psychiatric advance directives (PADs) are legal tools that allow competent individuals to declare preferences for future mental health treatment when they may not be capable of doing so as a result of a psychiatric crisis. PADs allow individuals to maintain self-determination during times when they are most vulnerable to loss of autonomy and in need of assistance to make their preferences known...

This paper introduces a notion of data ows and mode declarations for IntelligentPad, a kind of component softwares. The mode speci es how component pads are used for testing the behavior of composite pads. Under the constraints obtained from a family of mode declarations, we present an expansion procedure to generate hypothetical composite pads. An experimental result shows that the usages of m...

A marked graph is a graph with a + or − sign on each vertex and is called consistent if each cycle has an even number of − signs. This concept is motivated by problems of communication networks and social networks. We present some new characterizations/recognition algorithms for consistent marked graphs.

We evaluate two coordinate transformation techniques in combination with grid stretching for pricing basket options in a sparse grid setting. The sparse grid technique is a basic technique for solving a high-dimensional partial differential equation. By creating a small hypercube sub-grid in the ‘composite’ sparse grid we can also determine hedge parameters accurately. We evaluate these techniq...

In this study, we used lentiviral-delivered shRNA to generate a clonal line of 3T3-F442A preadipocytes with stable silencing of hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) expression and examined the long-term consequence of this modification on fat pad development. HGF mRNA expression was reduced 94%, and HGF secretion 79% (P < 0.01), compared with preadipocytes treated with nontargeting shRNA. Fat pads de...