BackgroundThe differential diagnosis between patients with essential tremor (ET) and those with Parkinson’s disease (PD) whose main manifestation is tremor may be difficult unless using complex neuroimaging techniques such as 123I-FP-CIT SPECT. We considered that using smartphone’s accelerometer to stablish a diagnostic test based on time-frequency differences between PD an ET could support the clinical diagnosis.MethodsThe study was carried out in 17 patients with PD, 16 patients with ET, 12 healthy volunteers and 7 patients with tremor of undecided diagnosis (TUD), who were re-evaluated one year after the first visit to reach the definite diagnosis. The smartphone was placed over the hand dorsum to record epochs of 30 s at rest and 30 s during arm stretching. We generated frequency power spectra and calculated receiver operating characteristics curves (ROC) curves of total spectral power, to establish a threshold to separate subjects with and without tremor. In patients with PD and ET, we found that the ROC curve of relative energy was the feature discriminating better between the two groups. This threshold was then used to classify the TUD patients.ResultsWe could correctly classify 49 out of 52 subjects in the category with/without tremor (97.96% sensitivity and 83.3% specificity) and 27 out of 32 patients in the category PD/ET (84.38% discrimination accuracy). Among TUD patients, 2 of 2 PD and 2 of 4 ET were correctly classified, and one patient having PD plus ET was classified as PD.ConclusionsBased on the analysis of smartphone accelerometer recordings, we found several kinematic features in the analysis of tremor that distinguished first between healthy subjects and patients and, ultimately, between PD and ET patients. The proposed method can give immediate results for the clinician to gain valuable information for the diagnosis of tremor. This can be useful in environments where more sophisticated diagnostic techniques are unavailable.

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Incremental forming can be an alternative manufacturing means in producing biomedical parts characterized by the need of patient-specific geometry. A novel hybrid dieless sheet metal forming process, electrically-assisted mixed double-sided incremental forming (E-MDSIF), is proposed to manufacture difficult-to-form Ti6Al4V sheets. E-MDSIF is a spark-free technique shown to increase the formability and the geometric accuracy while decreasing the forming force. The effects of the electrical\ud process on microstructure, micro-hardness and surface roughness of the formed parts are investigated. Additionally, comparisons between E-MDSIF and the conventional E-ISF processes are illustrated based on fundamental mechanics. Limitations and potential applications are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Electrically assisted (EA) wire drawing process is a hybrid manufacturing process characterized by enhancement of the formability, ductility, and elongation of the wire drawn specimen. A thermomechanical model to describe the change of the mechanical response due to the thermal contribution is proposed in this work. Additionally, a numerical simulation was conducted to study the potential and limitations of this hybrid process by using two different hardening laws: a phenomenological and a dislocation-based hardening laws. The results show how the flow stress, the effective plastic strain, and residual stresses behave under the electroplusing effect. In addition, electron backscattered diffraction was used to study the electropulsing treatments on the microstructure during cold drawing. It is observed a decrease of the high- and low-angle grain boundaries (LAGB) for samples deformed with electropulsing. This detwinning process has a strong influence on the strain hardening by improving the material formability. It was shown that the two proposed hardening laws adequately describe the EA wire drawing process showing a similar mechanical behavior. Nevertheless, the dislocation-based hardening law has the potential to be generalized to many other material and process configurations without extensive number of material tests as the phenomenological hardening law would require.

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The size effects in metal forming have been found to be crucial in micro-scale plastic deformation or micro-forming processes, which lead to attenuation of the material’s formability due to the increasing heterogeneity of the plastic flow. The use of an electric field during micro-scale plastic deformation has shown to relieve size effects, enhance the material’s formability, modify the microstructure, etc. Consequently, these electric-assisted (EA) micro-forming processes seem to bring many potential benefits that need to be investigated. Accordingly, here we investigated the influence of an electric field on the size effects to describe the fracture behavior in uniaxial micro-tension tests of an AZ31 alloy with various grain sizes. In order to decouple the thermal-mechanical and microstructure changes, room temperature (RT), oven-heated (OH), air-cooled (AC), and EA uniaxial micro-tension tests were conducted. The size effects contribution on the fracture stress and strain showed a similar trend in all the testing configurations. However, the smallest fracture stresses and the largest fracture strains were denoted in the EA configuration. EBSD examination shows that current-induced dynamic recrystallization (DRX) and texture evolution could be negligible under the studied conditions. The kernel average misorientation (KAM) maps give the larger plastic deformation in the EA specimens due to the reduction of plastic micro-heterogeneity. Finally, the fracture morphology indicates that the current-induced ductility enhancement may be attributed to the arrest of micro-crack propagation and the inhibition of void initiation, growth, and coalescence caused by lattice melting and expansion.

This report describes the effect of the ball-burnishing process on the mechanical properties of 2050 aluminium alloy that was previously friction stir welded. This process is a fast, environmentally-friendly and cost-effective surface treatment based on the plastic deformation of the surface irregularities. Consequently, residual stress, material hardening and micro-structural alterations are investigated to improve fatigue strength and wear resistance. The results show that the ball-burnishing treatment enhances the surface properties by increasing the material hardness about 37.5% and by decreasing the average surface roughness from 2.23 μm to 0.06 μm when a high pressure and a perpendicular burnishing is deployed. Additionally, in-depth compressive residual stresses are generated from −315 MPa to −700 MPa depending on the burnishing configuration. Finally, a numerical simulation of the material elastoplastic response is performed to analyze the residual stress continuity in the cross sectional area when using two radial feeds and burnishing pressures. In short, the present study helps to reduce time consumption by selecting the larger radial feed combined with a proper burnishing pressure to ensure the desired quality and compressive residual stress at the surface, which are indices of enhancing the fatigue strength at the nugget zone of the welded area.

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