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Research and clinical applications have demonstrated that the effects of tendon allografts are comparable to those of autografts when reconstructing injured tendons or ligaments, but allograft safety remains problematic. Sterilisation could eliminate or decrease the possibility of disease transmission, but current methods seldom achieve satisfactory sterilisation without affecting the mechanical properties of the tendon.Peracetic acid-ethanol in combination with low-dose gamma irradiation (PE-R) would inactivate potential deleterious microorganisms without affecting mechanical and biocompatible properties of tendon allograft.Controlled laboratory design.HIV, PPV, PRV and BVDV inactivation was evaluated. After verifying viral inactivation, the treated tendon allografts were characterised by optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and tensile testing, and the cytocompatibility was assessed with an MTT assay and by subcutaneous implantation.Effective and efficient inactivation of HIV, PPV, PRV and BVDV was observed. Histological structure and ultrastructure were unchanged in the treated tendon allograft, which also exhibited comparable biomechanical properties and good biocompatibility.The preliminary results confirmed our hypothesis and demonstrated that the PE-R tendon allograft has significant potential as an alternative to ligament/tendon reconstruction.Tendon allografts have been extensively used in ligament reconstruction and tendon repair. However, current sterilisation methods have various shortcomings, so PE-R has been proposed. This study suggests that PE-R tendon allograft has great potential as an alternative for ligament/tendon reconstruction.Sterilisation has been a great concern for tendon allografts. However, most sterilisation methods cannot inactivate viruses and bacteria without impairing the mechanical properties of the tendon allograft.Peracetic acid/ethanol with gamma irradiation can effectively inactivate viruses and bacteria. Meanwhile, tendon allografts sterilised by this method maintain their physiological tendon structure, biomechanical integrity and good compatibility.

Abstract Protection devices are designed to provide high sensitivity to transients produced by undesirable conditions like lightning stroke, avoiding their operation under all tolerable events like switching operations. The problem of incorrect operation due to transient phenomena can be handled by two means, one is to allow the transients and provide additional logics in the relay, other means is to damp the oscillation from source side. Protection relays’ not always must trip or send a trip signal and sometimes, only an alarm is necessary. In this context, this research presents a fast and reliable formulation for transmission lines (TLs) switching operations and lightning strokes detection and identification. The proposed methodology is based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Euclidean Norm (EN); by using PCA it is possible to determine that normal operation signals describe a very well defined Ellipsoidal Pattern (EP). In this manner, by calculating the Euclidean Norm (EN) among Principal Components (PCs) for each sample and the origin of the reference Ellipsoidal Pattern, switching operations and lightning strokes are detected and identified. Test results show that the proposed algorithm presents high success on phenomena detection and identification, presenting a high potential for online applications.

Abstract One factor that significantly limits blade service life and reliability in GT-100 power turbines is sulphide-oxide metal corrosion of guide and rotating blades. Application of coatings is the most efficient method to prevent corrosion failure. An electron beam physical vapour deposition CoCrAlY coating is used for high and low pressure turbine first-stage rotating blades made from E1 893 alloy. Studies of CoCrAlY-coated blades after different service periods (from 390 to 5900 h) showed that this coating most efficiently protects rotating blades in turbines which operate in northern regions of the country. Because of low temperature hot corrosion leakage, corrosion failure is observed in turbines operating in southern regions of the country. In order to improve corrosion resistance, a ceramic coating has been developed. These coatings increase the endurance of equipment and make it possible to save energy.

The paper proves the economic feasibility of using a local autonomous source of energy supply, which is formed from electrical equipment of other functional purposes based on an asynchronous machine with capacitive self-excitation. To assess the technical and economic indicators of the effectiveness of introducing a local autonomous source of energy supply, the discounted method is adopted, where an indicator of savings from possible losses due to the exclusion of labor resources from production is used as an additional influence factor.

For the evaluation of the detection and measurement limits for gamma-spectrometry measurements formulas were elaborated assuming the presence of the background component, which correlates with the analytical peak in the sense of: (1) linear relation between the expectation value of the peak and background counts, and (2) statistical correlation between peak and background counts. It is shown that neglecting the correlated background component can lead to a significant overestimation of the detection and measurement limits. The problem of evaluating of the correlated background component by applying experimental and computational approaches is also considered.

AbstractDespite the rapid increase in the performance of perovskite solar cells (PSC), they still suffer from low lab‐to‐lab or people‐to‐people reproducibility. Aiming for a universal condition to high‐performance devices, we investigated the morphology evolution of a composite perovskite by tuning annealing temperature and precursor concentration of the perovskite film. Here, we introduce thermal annealing as a powerful tool to generate a well‐controlled excess of PbI2 in the perovskite formulation and show that this benefits the photovoltaic performance. We demonstrated the correlation between the film microstructure and electronic property and device performance. An optimized average grain size/thickness aspect ratio of the perovskite crystallite is identified, which brings about a highly reproducible power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 19.5 %, with a certified value of 19.08 %. Negligible hysteresis and outstanding morphology stability are observed with these devices. These findings lay the foundation for further boosting the PCE of PSC and can be very instructive for fabrication of high‐quality perovskite films for a variety of applications, such as light‐emitting diodes, field‐effect transistors, and photodetectors.