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Musculoskeletal injuries are a common cause of lost training days and wastage in racehorses. Many bone injuries are a consequence of repeated high loading during fast work, resulting in chronic damage accumulation and material fatigue of bone. The highest joint loads occur in the fetlock, which is also the most common site of subchondral bone injury in racehorses. Microcracks in the subchondral bone at sites where intra-articular fractures and palmar osteochondral disease occur are similar to the fatigue damage detected experimentally after repeated loading of bone. Fatigue is a process that has undergone much study in material science in order to avoid catastrophic failure of engineering structures. The term 'fatigue life' refers to the numbers of cycles of loading that can be sustained before failure occurs. Fatigue life decreases exponentially with increasing load. This is important in horses as loads within the limb increase with increasing speed. Bone adapts to increased loading by modelling to maintain the strains within the bone at a safe level. Bone also repairs fatigued matrix through remodelling. Fatigue injuries develop when microdamage accumulates faster than remodelling can repair. Remodelling of the equine metacarpus is reduced during race training and accelerated during rest periods. The first phase of remodelling is bone resorption, which weakens the bone through increased porosity. A bone that is porous following a rest period may fail earlier than a fully adapted bone. Maximising bone adaptation is an important part of training young racehorses. However, even well-adapted bones accumulate microdamage and require ongoing remodelling. If remodelling inhibition at the extremes of training is unavoidable then the duration of exposure to high-speed work needs to be limited and appropriate rest periods instituted. Further research is warranted to elucidate the effect of fast-speed work and rest on bone damage accumulation and repair.

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Sandwich panels with auxetic lattice cores confined between metallic facets are proposed for localised impact resistance applications. Their performance under localised impact is numerically studied, considering the rate-dependent effects. The behaviour of the composite structure material at high strain rates is modelled with the Johnson-Cook model. Parametric analyses are conducted to assess the performance of different designs of the hybrid composite structures. The results are compared with monolithic panels of equivalent areal mass and material in terms of deformations and plastic energy dissipation. Design parameters considered for the parametric analyses include the auxetic unit cell effective Poisson’s ratio, thickness of the facet, material properties and radius of the unit cell’s struts. Significant reduction in computational time is achieved by modelling a quarter of the panel, with shell elements for facets and beam elements for the auxetic core. With projectile impacts up to 200 m/s, the auxetic composite panels are found to be able to absorb a similar amount of energy through plastic deformation, while the maximum back facet displacements are reduced up to 56% due to localised densification and plastic deformation of the auxetic core.

Single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) and room temperature ionic liquid (RTIL) were used to make a gel microelectrode for studies of the oxidation of nitric oxide (NO). The Faraday response of the gel microelectrode was contributed from two components: an outside-surface microdisk and a thin-layer cell formed by inner porous electrode materials, and enhanced by the thin-layer effect. An EC mechanism, electrochemical NO oxidation followed by a chemical oxidation, was proposed. The gel microelectrode with a Nafion coating eliminated interferences from nitrite and some biomolecules, improved stability, and had a linear response range from 100 nM to 100 mM.