For Resistive Fault Current Limiters (RFCLs) based on high temperature superconducting coated conductors (HTS-CCs), inhomogeneity, in terms of critical current and geometrical imperfections such as stabilizer and substrate thicknesses, plays a very important role and it may limit the penetration of such devices into the electrical market. This paper presents an electro-thermal model, developed ...

Introduction: At high magnetic field strength, B1 inhomogeneity causes undesired effects of non-uniformity in SNR and contrast. For slice selective excitation, 3D RF pulse design proposed in [1,2,3], can be used to mitigate this B1 inhomogeneity effect. These designs are based on playing kz sinc “spokes” of different amplitude at a number of (kx,ky) locations around the k-space origin. The sinc...

The topological derivative of cost functionals J that depend on the stress (through the displacement gradient, assuming a linearly elastic material behavior) is considered in a quite general 3D setting where both the background and the inhomogeneity may have arbitrary anisotropic elastic properties. The topological derivative DJ(z) of J quantifies the asymptotic behavior of J under the nucleati...

Amato [1] on our recent study [2], in which we proposed that ventilation inhomogeneity should be regarded as an additional prospective index along with blood gases, lung mechanics and hemodynamics in a multifactorial method to optimize positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP) at the bedside. We agree with Costa and Amato that some ventilation heterogeneity may be good [1]. Especially in patients...