Cell manipulation is imperative to the areas of cellular biology and tissue engineering, providing them a useful tool for patterning cells into cellular patterns for different analyses and applications. This paper presents a novel approach to perform three-dimensional (3D) cell manipulation and patterning with a multi-layer engineered scaffold. This scaffold structure employed dielectrophoresis as the non-contact mechanism to manipulate cells in the 3D domain. Through establishing electric fields via this multi-layer structure, the cells in the medium became polarized and were attracted towards the interior part of the structure, forming 3D cellular patterns. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the manipulation and the patterning processes with the proposed structure. Results show that with the presence of a voltage input, this multi-layer structure was capable of manipulating different types of biological cells examined through dielectrophoresis, enabling automatic cell patterning in the time-scale of minutes. The effects of the voltage input on the resultant cellular pattern were examined and discussed. Viability test was performed after the patterning operation and the results confirmed that majority of the cells remained viable. After 7 days of culture, 3D cellular patterns were observed through SEM. The results suggest that this scaffold and its automated dielectrophoresis-based patterning mechanism can be used to construct artificial tissues for various tissue engineering applications.

Contact of viscoelastic materials with complicated properties and surface topography require numerical solution approaches. This paper presents a 3-D semianalytical contact model for viscoelastic materials. With the hereditary integral operator and elastic-viscoelastic correspondence principle, surface displacement is expressed in terms of viscoelastic creep compliance and contact pressure distribution history in the course of a contact process. Through discretizing the contact equations in both spatial and temporal dimensions, a numerical algorithm based on the robust Conjugate Gradient method and Fast Fourier transform has been developed to solve the normal approach, contact pressure, and real contact area simultaneously. The transient contact analysis in the time domain is computationally expensive. The fast Fourier transform algorithm can help reduce the computation cost significantly. The comparisons of the new numerical results with an analytical viscoelastic contact solution for Maxwell materials and with an indentation test measurement reported in the literature has validated and demonstrated the accuracy of the proposed model. Moreover, the present model has been used to simulate the contact between a polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) substrate and a rigid sphere driven by step, ramped, and harmonic normal loads. The validated model and numerical method can successfully compute the viscoelastic contact responses of polymer-based materials with time-dependent properties and surface roughness subjected to complicated loading profiles.

This letter presents a novel log‐periodic reflectarray element based on a single‐layer substrate. To achieve a full 360° phase coverage with a gentle slope, the corresponding parameters are optimized. For the sake of minimizing the effects of the feed blockage, the proposed element is used to construct a Ka‐band offset‐fed reflectarray antenna whose aperture size is 81 mm × 81 mm. Moreover, a corresponding prototype is also fabricated to test the actual radiation performance. The measured maximum gain is 26.65 dB at the center frequency of 33 GHz with the aperture efficiency of 46.34%. Moreover, the measured peak sidelobe for E‐plane is lower than −17.87 dB and 10.69% of 1‐dB gain bandwidth is also achieved, which demonstrates that the proposed antenna features the characteristic of broadband. The simulated and measured results show that the proposed antenna features good radiation performance, which has the potential for 5G communication systems.

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