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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Optical Emission Spectroscopy Diagnostics Of Cold Plasmas For Food Sterilization, Abhijit Jassem, Michael Lauria, Russell Brayfield Ii, Kevin M. Keener, Allen L. Garner Aug 2015

Optical Emission Spectroscopy Diagnostics Of Cold Plasmas For Food Sterilization, Abhijit Jassem, Michael Lauria, Russell Brayfield Ii, Kevin M. Keener, Allen L. Garner

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

There is a growing need for economical, effective, and safe methods of sterilizing fresh produce. The most common method is a chlorine wash, which is expensive and may introduce carcinogens. High voltage cold atmospheric pressure plasmas are a promising solution that has demonstrated a germicidal effect; however, the responsible chemical mechanisms and reaction pathways are not fully understood. To elucidate this chemistry, we used optical emission spectroscopy to measure the species produced in the plasma generated by a 60 Hz pulsed dielectric barrier discharge in a plastic box containing various fill gases (He, N2, CO2, dry …


Bio-Inspired Composite Hydrogels For Osteochondral Regenerative Engineering, Grant N. Gellert, Liangju Kuang, Chunhui Jiang, Nur P. Damayanti, Joseph Irudayaraj, Meng Deng Aug 2015

Bio-Inspired Composite Hydrogels For Osteochondral Regenerative Engineering, Grant N. Gellert, Liangju Kuang, Chunhui Jiang, Nur P. Damayanti, Joseph Irudayaraj, Meng Deng

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Treatment of osteochondral defects encompassing injury or degeneration to both the articular cartilage as well as the underlying subchondral bone presents a significant medical challenge. Current treatment options including autografts and allografts suffer from limited availability and risk of immunogenicity, respectively. The long term goal of this work is to develop an integrated scaffold system for treatment of osteochondral defects via in situ regeneration of bone, cartilage and the bone-cartilage interface. Hydrogels composed of polymer networks swollen in water provide an attractive biomaterial platform for regeneration of cartilage. In the present study, we have developed a novel composite hydrogel consisting …


Deconstructing Cation-Pi Interactions: Understanding The Binding Energies Involved With Metal And Aromatic Amino Acid Residues, Jen E. Werner, Lyudmila V. Slipchenko, Yen Bui Aug 2015

Deconstructing Cation-Pi Interactions: Understanding The Binding Energies Involved With Metal And Aromatic Amino Acid Residues, Jen E. Werner, Lyudmila V. Slipchenko, Yen Bui

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The Effective Fragment Potential (EFP) method is a computationally efficient technique for describing non-covalent interactions, such as hydrogen bonding and van der Waals forces. Cation-pi interactions are a type of non-covalent interactions and are thought to be important in biological processes, such as permittivity of ion channels. The goal of our work is to establish that the EFP method reliably describes the strength, directionality, and composition of cation-pi interactions. Optimal geometries were found for a series of biologically relevant cations (K+, Li+, Na+, Ca2+, and Mg2+) and aryl moieties appearing …