Fabrication and characterization of chicken feather keratin/polysaccharides blended polymer coated nonwoven dressing materials for wound healing applications.

In this research work, three kinds of nonwoven wound dressings were developed from chicken feather keratin (CFK-NW), keratin­sodium alginate (CFK-SA-NW) and keratin-chitosan (CFK-CS-NW) and characterized using FTIR and SEM. The physical characteristics such as air permeability, thickness and areal density test results revealed the suitability of fabricated materials for wound dressing applications. CFK-SA-NW and CFK-CS-NW indicated a positive antibacterial effect against Gram's positive Staphylococcus aureus and Gram's negative Klebsiella pneumoniae and Escherichia coli bacteria with the zone of inhibition enhanced over >2.0 cm. Moreover, the biomedical potentials of dressing materials has been investigated by cell viability and cytotoxicity tests. Further, the wound healing ability was demonstrated using in vivo model (Albino Wistar rat). The fabricated materials exhibited good support for cell viability and a strong cytocompatibility. Furthermore, the hundred percent wound healing ability of CFK-CS-NW, CFK-SA-NW, CFK-NW and untreated control rats was observed at 15, 17, 21 and 23 days, respectively, Moreover, the wound healing potential of CFK-CS-NW and CFK-SA-NW was found to be better than that of CFK-NW and control group of rats. The outcome of the present study discloses the prospective applications of the developed materials as wound dressing biomaterial.

Application of computational fluid dynamics techniques to blood pumps.

Present-day computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques can be used to analyze the behavior of fluid flow in a variety of pumps. CFD can be a powerful tool during the design stage for rapid virtual prototyping of different designs, analyzing performance parameters, and making design improvements. Computational flow solutions provide information such as the location and size of stagnation zones and the local shear rate. These parameters can be correlated to the extent of hemolysis and thrombus formation and are critical to the success of a blood pump. CFD-ACE, an advanced commercial CFD code developed by CFD Research Corporation, has been applied to fluid flows in rotary machines, such as axial flow pumps and inducers. Preprocessing and postprocessing tools for efficient grid generation and advanced graphical flow visualization are integrated seamlessly with CFD-ACE. The code has structured multiblock grid capability, non-Newtonian fluid treatment, a variety of turbulence models, and an Eulerian-Langrangian particle tracking model. CFD-ACE has been used successfully to study the flow characteristics in an axial flow blood pump. An unstructured flow solver that greatly automates the process of grid generation and speeds up the flow simulation is under development.