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Many porting systems for internal combustion engines have been tried and tested over the years, however the basic spring actuated poppet valve system has prevailed over the last century. In the goal to lower engine output parasitic losses, a simple rotary valve porting system design is proposed and analyzed. The proposed design concept takes into consideration and combines all the prominent advantages of many ealier mutlitiple design variations over the past century. The inherent primary advantage of such a rotary porting system is the elimination of reciprocating components, thus lowering vibration, and removal of highly stiff springs which contribute to considerable system power loss. Comparable sized 3-D representations of both systems are constructed in CAD (Computer Aided Design) software in order to run mechanical and fluid simulations to validate the efficiency advantage of a rotary valve porting system. Using Pro/Engineer Mechanism Dynamics module, the minimum torque required to actuate both systems at 2000 rpm and 3000 rpm is determined. Fluid simulations are performed using a commercial software CFDesign V10. Volumetric flow rates are compared during the intake stroke as well as turbulence intensity factors which characterizes a systems ability to properly mix the Air/Fuel mixture and the combustion efficiency. Some possible improvement on the rotary geometry is suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of free software tools have been made available for the evaluation of fluorescence cell micrographs. The main users are biologists and related life scientists with no or little knowledge of image processing. In this review, we give an overview of available tools and guidelines about which tools the users should use to segment fluorescence micrographs. We selected 15 free tools and divided them into stand-alone, Matlab-based, ImageJ-based, free demo versions of commercial tools and data sharing tools. The review consists of two parts: First, we developed a criteria catalogue and rated the tools regarding structural requirements, functionality (flexibility, segmentation and image processing filters) and usability (documentation, data management, usability and visualization). Second, we performed an image processing case study with four representative fluorescence micrograph segmentation tasks with figure-ground and cell separation. The tools display a wide range of functionality and usability. In the image processing case study, we were able to perform figure-ground separation in all micrographs using mainly thresholding. Cell separation was not possible with most of the tools, because cell separation methods are provided only by a subset of the tools and are difficult to parametrize and to use. Most important is that the usability matches the functionality of a tool. To be usable, specialized tools with less functionality need to fulfill less usability criteria, whereas multipurpose tools need a well-structured menu and intuitive graphical user interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analytics of single biological cells allows quantitative investigation from a structural, functional and dynamical point of view and opens novel possibilities to an unamplified subcellular analysis. In this article, we report on three different experimental methods and their applications to single cellular systems with a subcellular sensitivity down to the single molecule level. First, the subcellular surface structure of living bacteria ( Corynebacterium glutamicum) was investigated with atomic force microscopy (AFM) at the resolution of individual surface layer (S-layer) proteins; discrimination of bacterial strains that lack the expression of hexagonally packed surface layer proteins was possible. Second, quantitative measurement of individual recognition events of membrane-bound receptors on living B-cells was achieved in single cell manipulation and probing experiments with optical tweezers (OT) force spectroscopy. And third, intracellular dynamics of translocating photoactivatable GFP in plant protoplasts ( Nicotiana tabacum BY-2) was quantitatively monitored by two-photon laser scanning microscopy (2PLSM). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]