Preparation and performance evaluation of a novel orthodontic adhesive incorporating composite dimethylaminohexadecyl methacrylate-Polycaprolactone fibers.

This study addressed enamel demineralization, a common complication in fixed orthodontic treatment, by evaluating a novel orthodontic adhesive with DMAHDM-PCL composite fibers. These fibers, produced through electrospinning, were incorporated into orthodontic adhesive to create experimental formulations at different concentrations and a control group. The study assessed antimicrobial properties, biosafety, and mechanical characteristics. New orthodontic adhesive exhibited significant bacteriostatic effects, reducing bacterial biofilm activity and concentrations. Incorporating 1% and 3% DMAHDM-PCL did not affect cytocompatibility. Animal tests confirmed no inflammatory irritation. Shear bond strength and adhesive residual index results indicated that antimicrobial fibers didn't impact bonding ability. In conclusion, orthodontic adhesives with 3% DMAHDM-PCL fibers are potential antimicrobial bonding materials, offering a comprehensive solution to enamel demineralization in orthodontic patients.

Effect of the Cross-Section of a Porous Burner on the Combustion Stability Limit of Premixed Oxy-Methane Flames.

This study presents the idea of using a porous media burner to improve the oxy-methane combustion reaction rate and broaden the stability limit. Numerical studies on the premixed combustion of CH4/O2/CO2 in a two-layer porous medium burner using a two-dimensional symmetrical volume-average model with the skeleton mechanism based on OpenFOAM. The combustion characteristics of burners with variable cross-sectional (VC) and straight cylindrical (SC) structures were compared, including stable range, temperature field, thermal cycle efficiency, and CO emissions. It is confirmed that the cross-sectional structure is effective for broadening the stable range, and the broadening rate is more than 4 times. As more heat is lost from the outlet due to the increased cross-section, the solid-phase temperature of VC is lower than that of SC. As a result, the flame temperature of VC will be about 200 K lower than that of SC under the condition of insulated walls. It also leads to a reduction of about 2% in thermal cycle efficiency compared with SC. Meanwhile, it is shown that the VC structure slightly increases CO emissions at low thermal power but is smaller than that of SC at high power. When the wall heat loss of the burner is considered, the VC structure is still effective for improving the stable range. In addition, the VC structure slightly affects flame tilt and temperature uniformity at the burner outlet when the thermal power is large. It is confirmed that the VC structure is effective for increasing the power adjustment range and reducing pollutant emissions at high power.

DPCN++: Differentiable Phase Correlation Network for Versatile Pose Registration.

Pose registration is critical in vision and robotics. This article focuses on the challenging task of initialization-free pose registration up to 7DoF for homogeneous and heterogeneous measurements. While recent learning-based methods show promise using differentiable solvers, they either rely on heuristically defined correspondences or require initialization. Phase correlation seeks solutions in the spectral domain and is correspondence-free and initialization-free. Following this, we propose a differentiable solver and combine it with simple feature extraction networks, namely DPCN++. It can perform registration for homo/hetero inputs and generalizes well on unseen objects. Specifically, the feature extraction networks first learn dense feature grids from a pair of homogeneous/heterogeneous measurements. These feature grids are then transformed into a translation and scale invariant spectrum representation based on Fourier transform and spherical radial aggregation, decoupling translation and scale from rotation. Next, the rotation, scale, and translation are independently and efficiently estimated in the spectrum step-by-step. The entire pipeline is differentiable and trained end-to-end. We evaluate DCPN++ on a wide range of tasks taking different input modalities, including 2D bird's-eye view images, 3D object and scene measurements, and medical images. Experimental results demonstrate that DCPN++ outperforms both classical and learning-based baselines, especially on partially observed and heterogeneous measurements.

Development and Characterization of Novel Orthodontic Adhesive Containing PCL-Gelatin-AgNPs Fibers.

Enamel demineralization around brackets is a relatively common complication of fixed orthodontic treatment, which seriously affects the aesthetics of teeth. In this study, a novel orthodontic adhesive containing polycaprolactone−gelatin−silver nanoparticles (PCL−gelatin−AgNPs) composite fibers was prepared to prevent enamel demineralization of orthodontic treatment. First, PCL−gelatin−AgNPs fibers film prepared by electrospinning was made into short fibers and added to traditional orthodontic adhesives (Transbond XT, 3M Unitek) in three different ratios to design a series of composite adhesives containing antibacterial materials. The antimicrobial performance of the control product and the three samples were then evaluated by bacterial live/dead staining, colony-forming unit (CFU) counts, tensile bond strength (TBS), and adhesive residue index (ARI) scores. The composite adhesives' antimicrobial properties increased with the increasing content of PCL−gelatin−AgNPs short fibers. The addition of complex antimicrobial fibers to 3M Transbond XT adhesive can significantly reduce the CFU of bacterial biofilms (p < 0.05). The bacterial survival rate on the surface of the specimen decreased with the increase of PCL−gelatin−AgNPs short fibers (p < 0.05). The TBS and ARI values (n = 10) indicated that adding PCL−gelatin−AgNPs short fibers had no significant adverse effect on adhesion. Therefore, adding PCL−gelatin−AgNPs short fibers makes it possible to fabricate orthodontic adhesives with strong antibacterial properties without compromising the bonding ability, which is essential for preventing enamel demineralization around the brackets.

Radar-to-Lidar: Heterogeneous Place Recognition via Joint Learning.

Place recognition is critical for both offline mapping and online localization. However, current single-sensor based place recognition still remains challenging in adverse conditions. In this paper, a heterogeneous measurement based framework is proposed for long-term place recognition, which retrieves the query radar scans from the existing lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) maps. To achieve this, a deep neural network is built with joint training in the learning stage, and then in the testing stage, shared embeddings of radar and lidar are extracted for heterogeneous place recognition. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted tests and generalization experiments on the multi-session public datasets and compared them to other competitive methods. The experimental results indicate that our model is able to perform multiple place recognitions: lidar-to-lidar (L2L), radar-to-radar (R2R), and radar-to-lidar (R2L), while the learned model is trained only once. We also release the source code publicly: https://github.com/ZJUYH/radar-to-lidar-place-recognition.

Tunable optical activity of plasmonic dimers assembled by DNA origami.

We investigate the optical response of gold nanorod (AuNR) dimers assembled in parallel on a DNA origami template. Plasmonic circular dichroism (CD) was found to be highly dependent on the orientation of the dimers relative to the DNA axis and the inter-rod distances. Dipole-dipole distances play a critical role in the induced plasmonic chirality. The orientation dependence of induced CD was further verified by AuNR/Au nanosphere (AuNS) heterodimers. The experimental results of the plasmonic CD agreed well with theoretical calculations.

Study the adsorption of phenol from aqueous solution on hydroxyapatite nanopowders.

In this study, the hydroxyapatite (HAp) nanopowders prepared by chemical precipitation method were used as the adsorbent, and the potential of HAp nanopowders for phenol adsorption from aqueous solution was studied. The effect of contact time, initial phenol concentration, pH, adsorbent dosage, solution temperature and adsorbent calcining temperature on the phenol adsorption, and the adsorption kinetic, equilibrium and thermodynamic parameters were investigated. The results showed that the HAp nanopowders possessed good adsorption ability to phenol. The adsorption process was fast, and it reached equilibrium in 2h of contact. The initial phenol concentration, pH and the adsorbent calcining temperature played obvious effects on the phenol adsorption capacity onto HAp nanopowders. Increase in the initial phenol concentration could effectively increase the phenol adsorption capacity. At the same time, increase in the pH to high-acidity or to high-alkalinity also resulted in the increase in the phenol adsorption capacity. Increase in the HAp dosage could effectively increase the phenol adsorption percent. However, the higher calcining temperature of HAp nanopowders could obviously decrease the adsorption capacity. The maximum phenol adsorption capacity was obtained as 10.33mg/g for 400mg/L initial phenol concentrations at pH 6.4 and 60 degrees C. The adsorption kinetic and the isotherm studies showed that the pseudo-second-order model and the Freundlich isotherm were the best choices to describe the adsorption behaviors. The thermodynamic parameters suggested that the adsorption of phenol onto HAp was physisorption, spontaneous and endothermic in nature.