Cadmium Hydroxyl Chloride with Balanced Band Gap and Second-Harmonic-Generation Response.

Ultraviolet (UV) nonlinear-optical (NLO) materials are crucial in laser technology due to their ability to modulate light frequency. In this work, when d10 cations, hydroxyl groups, and Cl atoms were combined, a cadmium double salt, Cd(OH)Cl, was synthesized by a simple hydrothermal method. It has a large phase-matched second-harmonic-generation (SHG) response at 1064 nm (2.5 × KDP) with a short UV-cutoff edge (260 nm), which can be applied in a solar-blind UV band. Theoretical calculations suggest that [Cd(OH)3Cl3] groups lead to a large SHG response. Our work may shed light on the exploration of new NLO materials in metal hydroxyl chlorides.

Achieving superior anticoagulation of endothelial membrane mimetic coating by heparin grafting at zwitterionic biocompatible interfaces.

Thrombosis and bleeding are common complications of blood-contacting medical device therapies. In this work, an endothelium membrane mimetic coating (PMPCC/Hep) has been created to address these challenges. The coating is fabricated by multi-point anchoring of a phosphorylcholine copolymer (poly-MPC-co-MSA, PMPCC) with carboxylic side chains and end-group grafting of unfractionated heparin (Hep) onto polydopamine precoated blood-contacting material surfaces. The PMPCC coating forms an ultrathin cell outer membrane mimetic layer to resist protein adsorption and platelet adhesion. The tiny defects/pores of the PMPCC layer provide entrances for heparin end-group to be inserted and grafted onto the sub-layer amino groups. The combination of the PMPCC cell membrane mimetic anti-fouling nature with the grafted heparin bioactivity further enhances the anticoagulation performance of the formed endothelium membrane mimetic PMPCC/Hep coating. Compared to conventional Hep coating, the PMPCC/Hep coating further decreases protein adsorption and platelet adhesion by 50 % and 90 %, respectively. More significantly, the PMPCC/Hep coating shows a superior anticoagulation activity, even significantly higher than that of an end-point-attached heparin coating. Furthermore, the blood coagulation function is well preserved in the PMPCC/Hep coating anticoagulation strategy. All the results support that the PMPCC/Hep coating strategy has great potential in developing more efficient and safer blood-contacting medical devices.

Prostaglandin D2 regulates Escherichia coli-induced inflammatory responses through TLR2, TLR4, and NLRP3 in macrophages.

Prostaglandin D2 (PGD2) synthesis is closely associated with the innate immune response mediated by pattern recognition receptors (PPRs). We determined PGD2 synthesis whether mediated by Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2), TLR4 and Nod-like receptor pyrin domain-containing protein 3 (NLRP3) in Escherichia coli (E. coli)-, lipopolysaccharide (LPS)- and Braun lipoprotein (BLP)-stimulated macrophages. Our data demonstrate that TLR2, TLR4, and NLRP3 could regulate the synthesis of PGD2 through cyclo-oxygenase-2 (COX-2) and hematopoietic PGD synthase (H-PGDS) in E. coli-, LPS- or BLP-stimulated macrophages, suggesting that TLR2, TLR4, and NLRP3 are critical in regulating PGD2 secretion by controlling PGD2 synthetase expression in E. coli-, LPS- or BLP-stimulated macrophages. The H-PGDS (a PGD2 specific synthase) inhibitor pre-treatment could down-regulate the secretion of TNF-α, RANTES and IL-10 in LPS- and E. coli-stimulated macrophage. Meanwhile, H-PGDS inhibitor could down-regulate the secretion of TNF-α, while up-regulated RANTES and IL-10 secretion in BLP-stimulated macrophages, suggesting that PGD2 could regulate the secretion of cytokines and chemokines in E. coli-, LPS- or BLP-stimulated macrophages. Furthermore, exogenous PGD2 regulates the secretion of cytokines and chemokines through activation of MAPK and NF-κB signaling pathways after E. coli-, LPS- or BLP stimulation in macrophages. Taken together, PGD2 is found able to regulate E. coli-induced inflammatory responses through TLR2, TLR4, and NLRP3 in macrophages.

Ba3.75MgB7O14F2.5: A Mixed Alkaline-Earth Metal Borate Fluoride with Short Ultraviolet Cutoff Edge and Large Birefringence.

Fluorine-containing borate crystal materials are particularly attractive due to their rich structural chemistry and excellent properties for optical applications. In this work, a new compound Ba3.75MgB7O14F2.5 has been synthesized through the high-temperature solution method. In the crystal structure of Ba3.75MgB7O14F2.5, the [B7O14] basic building unit and the [MgO3F3] octahedra are interconnected to create a complex three-dimensional network. The structural feature of the less commonly observed [B7O14] units is discussed, and it has been found that such units in Ba3.75MgB7O14F2.5 are most conducive to achieving large birefringence. In addition, Ba3.75MgB7O14F2.5 exhibits good thermal stability, a short ultraviolet cutoff of 203 nm, and large birefringence (0.081@546 nm), indicating its potential as a new UV birefringent crystal.

Health Status Assessment of Diesel Engine Valve Clearance Based on BFA-BOA-VMD Adaptive Noise Reduction and Multi-Channel Information Fusion.

Regarding the problem of the valve gap health status being difficult to assess due to the complex composition of the condition monitoring signal during the operation of the diesel engine, this paper proposes an adaptive noise reduction and multi-channel information fusion method for the health status assessment of diesel engine valve clearance. For the problem of missing fault information of single-channel sensors in condition monitoring, we built a diesel engine valve clearance preset simulation test bench and constructed a multi-sensor acquisition system to realize the acquisition of diesel engine multi-dimensional cylinder head signals. At the same time, for the problem of poor adaptability of most signal analysis methods, the improved butterfly optimization algorithm by the bacterial foraging algorithm was adopted to adaptively optimize the key parameter for variational mode decomposition, with discrete entropy as the fitness value. Then, to reduce the uncertainty of artificially selecting fault characteristics, the characteristic parameters with a higher recognition degree of diesel engine signal were selected through characteristic sensitivity analysis. To achieve an effective dimensionality reduction integration of multi-channel features, a stacked sparse autoencoder was used to achieve deep fusion of the multi-dimensional feature values. Finally, the feature samples were entered into the constructed one-dimensional convolutional neural network with a four-layer parameter space for training to realize the health status assessment of the diesel engine. In addition, we verified the effectiveness of the method by carrying out valve degradation simulation experiments on the diesel engine test bench. Experimental results show that, compared with other common evaluation methods, the method used in this paper has a better health state evaluation effect.

Real-Time Tracking of Object Melting Based on Enhanced DeepLab v3+ Network.

In order to reveal the dissolution behavior of iron tailings in blast furnace slag, the main component of iron tailings, SiO2, was used for research. Aiming at the problem of information loss and inaccurate extraction of tracking molten SiO2 particles in high temperature, a method based on the improved DeepLab v3+ network was proposed to track, segment, and extract small object particles in real time. First, by improving the decoding layer of the DeepLab v3+ network, construct dense ASPP (atrous spatial pyramid pooling) modules with different dilation rates to optimize feature extraction, increase the shallow convolution of the backbone network, and merge it into the upper convolution decoding part to increase detailed capture. Secondly, integrate the lightweight network MobileNet v3 to reduce network parameters, further speed up image detection, and reduce the memory usage to achieve real-time image segmentation and adapt to low-level configuration hardware. Finally, improve the expression of the loss function for the binary classification model of small object in this paper, combining the advantages of the Dice Loss binary classification segmentation and the Focal Loss balance of positive and negative samples, solving the problem of unbalanced dataset caused by the small proportion of positive samples. Experimental results show that MIoU (mean intersection over union) of the proposed model for small object segmentation is 6% higher than that of the original model, the overall MIoU is increased by 3%, and the execution time and memory consumption are only half of the original model, which can be well applied to real-time tracking and segmentation of small particles.

Anchorable phosphorylcholine copolymer synthesis and cell membrane mimetic antifouling coating fabrication for blood compatible applications.

Protein adsorption and platelet activation on biomedical devices contacting blood may lead to the formation of thrombus. The thrombogenicity of biomaterials could be minimized or prevented by anchoring a cell membrane mimetic antifouling coating (CMMAC). Here, we report the construction of a CMMAC by a newly designed 2-methacryloyloxyethyl phosphorylcholine (MPC) copolymer (PMPCC) containing 5-20 carboxylic long arm side chains. The long arm provides its end carboxylic group with more freedom and a larger reaction space for an easier and more efficient surface anchoring. With the assistance of mussel-inspired universal adhesive polydopamine (PDA), different material surfaces precoated with PDA can immobilize the PMPCC via multipoint anchoring of the randomly distributed carboxylic side chains. The multipoint anchoring results in a stabilized and condensed PDA-PMPCC coating. The phosphorylcholine zwitterions of the densely immobilized PMPCC polymers form a cell outer membrane mimetic interface in an aqueous environment, endowing excellent properties of resisting protein adsorption, platelet activation and blood cell adhesion. More importantly, the PDA-PMPCC-coated glass surface can suppress thrombus formation for more than 24 h, while the bare glass surface forms obvious thrombus in 6 h tested in the same blood. Furthermore, the fabrication of the PDA-PMPCC coating is simple and material-independent. Therefore, the simple synthesis, facile surface coating and excellent hemocompatibility of the PMPCC make it a promising material for biomimetic surface modification.

A blood cell repelling and tumor cell capturing surface for high-purity enrichment of circulating tumor cells.

The detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs), an approach considered to be "liquid biopsy", is crucial in cancer diagnosis, monitoring and prognosis. However, the extremely large number of blood cells challenges the rare CTC isolation and enrichment. In this report, a red blood cell membrane mimetic surface (CMMS) is fabricated on material-independent substrates to repel blood cell adhesion. Meanwhile, tumor cell targeting ligands, folic acid (FA) and an arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) peptide, are tethered on the CMMS to give the decorated surface (CMMS-FA-RGD) tumor cell capture ability. The CMMS is composed of a mussel-inspired self-adhesive polydopamine layer and a covalently anchored non-fouling or anti-cell-adhesion layer of a phosphorylcholine zwitterion polymer and poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG). The protruding ends of the PEG chains of the anchored CMMS are further coupled with FA and RGD ligands to endow the tumor cells with specific binding. Furthermore, all the components of the step-by-step constructed surfaces are quantitatively controllable for optimizing the non-specific cell repellence and tumor cell binding performances. Thus, the delicately engineered CTC capture surface enhances the HeLa cell enrichment factor to 19 000-fold by repelling the adhesion of >99.999% blood cells, resulting in high capture efficiency (91%) and capture purity (89%) from the spiked whole blood samples. This substrate independent tumor cell capture and blood cell repellent surface modification strategy may provide a facile, versatile and cost-effective technology solution for more efficient cancer diagnosis and targeted therapy.

Design and Simulation Test of an Open D-Dot Voltage Sensor.

Nowadays, sensor development focuses on miniaturization and non-contact measurement. According to the D-dot principle, a D-dot voltage sensor with a new structure was designed based on the differential D-dot sensor with a symmetrical structure, called an asymmetric open D-dot voltage sensor. It is easier to install. The electric field distribution of the sensor was analyzed through Ansoft Maxwell and an open D-dot voltage sensor was designed. This open D-voltage sensor is characteristic of accessible insulating strength and small electric field distortion. The steady and transient performance test under 10 kV-voltage reported satisfying performances of the designed open D-dot voltage sensor. It conforms to requirements for a smart grid measuring sensor in intelligence, miniaturization and facilitation.