Microfluidic hydrogel microspheres have been broadly studied across a wide range of industries and applications, and their use in the medical field, including control cells and drug delivery, is increasing. The usual design of these materials is intended to enable the efficient and smart encapsulation of cells and/or drugs in microspheres in which the functionalities and features are effectively controlled, lending itself some unique properties. These characteristics promote exchanges and cooperation in multiple disciplines and boost the development of precision medicine, new manufacturing technologies, and applied materials. This review begins with a discussion of microfluidic hydrogel microspheres and then introduces the preparation equipment, main principles, and related characteristics of the microspheres. Furthermore, the medical applications of microfluidic hydrogel microspheres for delivering cells and drugs are emphasized. Finally, this review discusses perspectives and future directions for accelerating the development and application of microfluidic hydrogel microspheres for controlled delivery.
Preventing crimes or terrorist attacks in urban areas is challenging. Law enforcement officers need to respond quickly to catch the attacker on his escape route, which is subject to time-dependent traffic conditions on transportation networks. The attacker can strategically choose his escape path and driving speed to avoid being captured. Existing work on security resource allocation has not considered such scenarios with time-dependent strategies for both players. Therefore, in this paper, we study the problem of efficiently scheduling security resources for interdicting the escaping attacker. We propose: 1) a new defender-attacker security game model for escape interdiction on transportation networks; and 2) an efficient double oracle algorithm to compute the optimal defender strategy, which combines mixed-integer linear programming formulations for best response problems and effective approximation algorithms for improving the scalability of the algorithms. Experimental evaluation shows that our approach significantly outperforms baselines in solution quality and scales up to realistic-sized transportation networks with hundreds of intersections.
Three-dimensional BaTiO3 (3D BT)/polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) composite dielectrics were fabricated by inversely introducing PVDF solution into a continuous 3D BT network, which was simply constructed via the sol-gel method using a cleanroom wiper as a template. The effect of the 3D BT microstructure and content on the dielectric and energy storage properties of the composites were explored. The results showed that 3D BT with a well-connected continuous network and moderate grain sizes could be easily obtained by calcining a barium source containing a wiper template at 1100 °C for 3 h. The as-fabricated 3D BT/PVDF composites with 21.1 wt% content of 3D BT (3DBT–2) exhibited the best comprehensive dielectric and energy storage performances. An enhanced dielectric constant of 25.3 at 100 Hz, which was 2.8 times higher than that of pure PVDF and 1.4 times superior to the conventional nano–BT/PVDF 25 wt% system, was achieved in addition with a low dielectric loss of 0.057 and a moderate dielectric breakdown strength of 73.8 kV·mm−1. In addition, the composite of 3DBT–2 exhibited the highest discharge energy density of 1.6 × 10−3 J·cm−3 under 3 kV·mm−1, which was nearly 4.5 times higher than that of neat PVDF.
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