A new dual impeller centrifugal blood pump has been developed as a research collaboration between Baylor College of Medicine and Institute Dante Pazzanese of Cardiology for long-term left ventricle assist device (LVAD). A design feature of this new pump is a dual impeller that aims to minimize a stagnant flow pattern around the inlet port. Several different materials were tested in order to adopt a double pivot bearing design originally developed by Prof. Dr. Yukihiko Nosé from Baylor College of Medicine. Hydraulic performance tests were conducted with two different inlet ports' angle configurations 30 degrees and 45 degrees . Pump with inlet port angle of 45 degrees achieved best values of pressure ahead and flow after 1800 rpm. Preliminary hemolysis tests were conducted using human blood. The pump showed good performance results and no alarming trace of hemolysis, proving to be a feasible long-term LVAD.

A mathematical model of an isothermal semibatch bubble reactor has been developed to describe the esterification reaction of free fatty acids with superheated alcohol vapor. The proposed model accounts for the effects of mass transfer followed by chemical reaction in the liquid phase. The fluid physical properties are calculated by published correlations, and the partition coefficient of alcohol vapor was estimated based on thermodynamic models of vapor−liquid equilibria. Experimental data of acid-catalyzed esterification of oleic acid with superheated ethanol vapor at different conditions of temperature and gas superficial velocities were used to estimate the liquid side mass transfer coefficients and kinetic parameters. The results obtained showed that the model satisfactorily fits the experimental data for all operating conditions and was also able to simulate and predict experimental results for intermediate conditions with a coefficient of determination R 2 of 0.987. In addition, the estimated values of the mass transfer coefficient agreed with data reported in the literature for gas−liquid reactors.

This paper analizes the complexity-performance tradeoff of relay selection (RS) methods for cooperative networks (CoopNet), specially applied to wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The performance-complexity of the classical RS methods such as opportunistic (O-RS), random (R-RS), maximum harmonic mean (MHM-RS), best-worse (BW-RS), max-generalized-mean (MGM-RS) and maximum signal-noise ratio (Max-SNR) have been analysed by simulation considering one and two hops with increasing number of available relays and set of selected relays as well. The complexity in terms of number of operations and computational time is analysed in order to confirm the feasibility of the RS methods under the perspective of digital signal processing architecture.