Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a new and growing area of materials with high porosity and customizability. UiO-66, a zirconium-based MOF, has shown much interest to the military because of the ability of the MOF to catalytically decontaminate chemical warfare agents (CWAs). Unfortunately, the applications for MOFs are limited because of their powder form, which is difficult to incorporate into protective clothing. As a result, a new area of research has developed to functionalize fabrics with MOFs to make a wearable multifunctional fabric that retains the desired properties of the MOF. In this work, UiO-66 was incorporated into poly(vinylidene) fluoride/Ti(OH) composite fabric using electrospinning and evaluated for its use in chemical protective clothing. The base triethanolamine (TEA) was added to the composite fabric to create a self-buffering system that would allow for catalytic decontamination of CWAs without the need for a buffer solution. The fabrics were tested against the simulants methyl-paraoxon (dimethyl (4-nitrophenyl) phosphate, DMNP), diisopropyl fluorophosphate (DFP), and the nerve agent soman (GD). The results show that all of the samples have high moisture vapor transport and filtration efficiency, which are desirable for protective clothing. The incorporation of TEA decreased air permeation of the fabric, but increased the catalytic activity of the composite fabric against DMNP and DFP. Samples with and without TEA have rapid half-lives ( t) as short as 35 min against GD agent. These new catalytically active self-buffering multifunctional fabrics have great potential for application in chemical protective clothings.

The Transvenous Cardiac Leads Working Group of the Cardiac Rhythm Management Devices Committee of the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation is developing a fatigue performance standard for cardiac device leads. The proposed standard would calculate a figure-of-merit (FOM) that is based on a life prediction using a Bayesian framework. The framework uses distributions for bending fatigue strength, patient age, patient activity level, and in vivo bending. The benchtop fatigue testing portion of the standard is based on the unsupported bending of the lead at multiple alternating curvature levels to generate fatigue fracture data in low-cycle and high-cycle regimes. To estimate the interlaboratory reproducibility of the benchtop testing methodology, a lead mock-up was constructed from a bifilar MP35N coil in a thin-walled polyurethane tube. Four laboratories each tested 48 specimens and produced fatigue life curves based on the results. To compare the data, the FOM

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