Creatures have evolved extremely intelligent and complex adaptive systems for conducting their movements. They are protein motors with typical sizes of a few tens of nanometers. Protein motors include three major protein families, myosin, kinesin and dynein, which participate in a wide range of cellular processes, using energy from the hydrolysis of adenosinetriphosphate ATP. To harness these protein motors to power nanometer-scale devices, we have investigated effective and non-destructive methods for immobilizing protein motors on surfaces and to arrange the output of these motors, e.g. force and movement, to be in a defined direction. We found NEB-22 to be useful for retaining the abilities of protein motors to support the movement of protein filaments. We fabricated various patterns of tracks of NEB-22 on coverslips and protein motors were introduced and immobilized on glass surface. The trajectories of protein polymers were confined to these tracks. Simple patterns readily biased and guide polymer movement confining it to be unidirectional. In addition, having used dynein c purified from Chlamydomonas flagellar axoneme, we showed that microtubules driven by surface-bound dynein were self-organized into dynamic streams through collisions between the microtubules and their subsequent joining.
The inside corrosion of failed automotive mufflers collected in China was investigated and the composition of the automotive exhaust gas condensate collected from HONGQI automobile was analyzed. According to the analyzed result of collected condensate’s composition, the corrosion resistance of a new designed high Cr stainless steel (B439M) bearing Nb and Ti and a low Cr T409L stainless steel were studied with a condensate corrosion test method which simulates the inside corrosion of automotive mufflers. The life of the two materials was estimated by extreme value analysis of the maximum corrosion depth obtained by the dip dry test (DDT). The life of type B439M steel was 1.6 times as long as that of type T409L steel. To clarify the corrosive process of the simulated condensate test, the electron work function (EWF) on the two stainless steels’ surface was evaluated. It was demonstrated that the surface of new designed stainless steel exhibited markedly improved resistances to corrosion during a simulated condensate test cycle and the corrosive process of simulated condensate test was evaluated and discussed.
The near-equiatomic TiNi alloy has been demonstrated to possess high wear resistance, which largely benefits from its pseudoelasticity (PE). However, the PE occurs only in a small temperature range, which makes the wear resistance of this alloy unstable as temperature changes, caused by environmental instability or frictional heating. Therefore, enlarging the working temperature of PE could considerably improve this alloy as a novel wear-resistant material. One possible approach is to develop a self-built temperature-dependent internal stress field by taking the advance of the difference in thermal expansion between the pseudoelastic matrix and a reinforcing phase. Such a T-dependent internal stress could adjust the martensitic transformation temperature to respond changes in environmental temperature so that the temperature range of PE could be enlarged, thus leading to a wide temperature range in which the minimum wear loss is retained. Research was conducted to investigate effects of an added second phase having a negative thermal expansion (NTE) coefficient on the wear resistance of a near-equiatomic TiNi alloy. It was demonstrated that the temperature range of this modified material in which the wear loss dropped was enlarged. In addition, the wear resistance of such a TiNi-matrix composite was on one order of magnitude higher than that of unmodified TiNi alloy.
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