The design and method for the production of an all-polymer microfluidic particle sorter, for use in biomedical applications, is described. The sorter is made from biocompatible materials with properties, such as high optical transparency, that make it useful in a biological laboratory. The method of sorting is designed to be gentle on biological species, using a method of guiding the particles ...

[1] In this, the second of a pair of papers on the structure of well-sorted natural granular material (sediment), new methods are described for automated measurements from images of sediment, of: 1) particle-size standard deviation (arithmetic sorting) with and without apparent void fraction; and 2) mean particle size in material with void fraction. A variety of simulations of granular material...

The objective of this experiment was to evaluate effects of reducing corn silage particle size on eating behavior, chewing activity, and rumen fermentation in lactating dairy cows. Four cannulated, multiparous cows averaging 110 +/- 4 d in milk and weighing 675 +/- 70 kg were randomly assigned to a 4 x 4 Latin square. During each of four 14-d periods, animals were offered one of four diets that...

Efficient and robust particle separation and enrichment techniques are critical for a diverse range of lab-on-a-chip analytical devices including pathogen detection, sample preparation, high-throughput particle sorting, and biomedical diagnostics. Previously, using insulator-based dielectrophoresis (iDEP) in microfluidic glass devices, we demonstrated simultaneous particle separation and concen...

Control of droplets in microfluidic environments has numerous applications ranging from analysis and sample preparation for biomaterials synthesis (Mann and Ozin 1996) and medical diagnostics (Pipper et al. 2007) to photonics (Schmidt and Hawkins 2011). Here we study the oscillations present in a microfluidic circuit capable of sorting curable droplets on demand by triggering the circuit with U...

The 54 kDa subunit of the signal recognition particle has to identify a diverse family of substrates and deliver them in a controlled manner to the translocation machinery of the endoplasmic reticulum. Important new insights into the function of this sorting protein have emerged from recent biochemical and structural studies.

[1] Motivated by the physical picture of shape-dependent air resistance and, consequently, shape-induced differential sedimentation of dust particles, we searched for and found evidence of dust particle asphericity affecting the evolution and distribution of dust-scattered light depolarization ratio (d). Specifically, we examined a large data set of Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarizat...

Another application of sorting for parallel computation is load–balancing. For instance, consider a collection of particles distributed in arbitrary ways in a three–dimensional space. With the work per particle approximately the same, one approach would be to simply divide the particles evenly among the processing nodes. Though this approach yields load–balance, it may result in excessive commu...

The Optimal Power Flow (OPF) is one of the most important issues in the power systems. Due to the complexity and discontinuity of some parameters of power systems, the classic mathematical methods are not proper for this problem. In this paper, the objective function of OPF is formulated to minimize the power losses of transmission grid and the cost of energy generation and improve the voltage ...