During the last few years, electroporation has been introduced to the food-processing industry as an effective method to open cell membranes for the extraction of substances. Currently, it has been investigated whether electroporation is also useful as a part of an energy-efficient drying process for plant material for the production of biofuel. To omit the use of additional water, the material has been placed in contact with the electrodes by means of its own juice after a first pressing step. This paper describes a laboratory-scale parameter study on the electroporation-assisted drying of whole maize plants, grass, and lucerne. The influence of the applied electric-field strength and the number of applied pulses on the drying curves is presented. For the electroporated material, an increased yield of juice during a pressing step after the electroporation and a faster drying have been observed.
The adhesion of soft tissue to any commonly used implant material is poor. Therefore percutaneous implants are an infectious passage of bacteria into the body. To address this problem, a method that allows the growth of living soft tissue on medical implants ranging from metals to temperature sensitive polymers is developed. The implant surface is to be coated with bioactive glass (BAG) by applying electron beam ablation (ELBA). A proof of principle of the ELBA potential is given by coating Ti6Al4V and silicone rubber (poly-dimethylsiloxane, PDMS) substrates with thin BAG layers (~10 -m thickness). The BAG coatings are amorphous, sufficiently adherent and showed the desired bioactive in vitro dissolution behaviour in Hanks' solution. Finally, in vitro fibroblast cell adhesion experiments were performed. Compared to an uncoated material both the coated PDMS and Ti6Al4V samples showed good cell adhesion and proliferation. These results support the hypothesis that a BAG coating deposited by ELBA can enhance the tissue bonding potential of many types of implants, including those made of temperature sensitive materials.
The properties of a proton source developed for use in a pulsed high power magnetically insulated ion diode have been determined. The source is created from a sliding gas discharge on the surface of a thin double layer of TiH and Pd deposited on an insulating substrate. By driving a short (<20 ns) high current pulse through the metal films hydrogen is released from the Ti store and a multichannel electrical breakdown is created in the desorbed gas layer. The uniformity of this breakdown depends on the capacitance per area of the multilayer setup. It has been found that the breakdown always occurs after the same areal gas density has been released. The density as well as the temperature of the plasma depend on a continuous influx of hydrogen from the reservoir and on the expansion. The electron temperature decreased from up to 12 early in the pulse to less than 3 eV late in the pulse. Over a distance of 1 mm the plasma density falls from 1017 at the surface to 1015 cm−3. The plasma expansion is stopped by a strong magnetic field parallel to the surface; however, the neutral hydrogen density increased with increasing magnetic field. Carbon ions are the most important contaminant of the hydrogen plasma. However, their fraction is smaller than 10%.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.