Quantitative determination of duloxetine and its metabolite in rat plasma by HPLC‐MS/MS

The major metabolite of duloxetine is a glucuronide conjugate of 4‐hydroxy duloxetine (4‐HD). However, interestingly, there have been no reports determining concentrations of 4‐HD and no fully validated method has been established for measuring duloxetine and 4‐HD in rat plasma. We developed a method for the simultaneous quantification of duloxetine and its metabolite in rat plasma using high‐performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. Duloxetine and 4‐HD were analyzed on a reverse‐phase C₁₈ analytical column after protein precipitation of the plasma sample with methanol, using carbamazepine as an internal standard. The isocratic mobile phase of 5 mm ammonium acetate–methanol (4:6, v/v) was eluted at 0.4 mL/min. Quantification was performed on a triple‐quadrupole mass spectrometer using electrospray ionization, and the ion transition monitored in selective reaction monitoring mode. The coefficient of variation for assay precision was <18.0%, and the accuracy was 84.0–118.0%. This method was successfully used to measure the concentrations of duloxetine and its metabolite in plasma following the oral administration of a single 40 mg/kg dose in rats. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Simplifying patterning process of ZnO nanowires by one step development and etching process

We present herein a simple protocol of growing a patterned ZnO nanowire by etching of ZnO seed layer in the tetramethyl ammonium hydroxide (TMAH) solution. The ZnO seed layer was fabricated by sol–gel method using zinc acetate solution and patterned by using photolithographic method. Patterned ZnO seed layer as etched in the TMAH solution, followed by growth of ZnO nanowires by hydrothermal method. Remarkable point of present ZnO seed layer patterning is that development of UV-exposed photoresist and etching of ZnO seed layer is subsequently processed in aqueous TMAH solution without interruption. The grown ZnO nanowires were analyzed using XRD patterns to exhibit high purity and degree of crystallinity, and showed very good pattern fidelity.     

Curvature measurement using phase shifting in-line interferometry,single shot off-axis geometry and Zernike's polynomial fitting

This paper describes the difference between phase shifting in-line interferometry, single shot off-axis geometry and Zernike's polynomial fitting methods for measuring the curvature of a spherical smooth surface by using the Michelson interferometer. In phase shifting in-line interferometry, four interferograms shifted by a piezoelectric actuator (PZT) were captured by a digital detector and corrected by using the flat fielding method. In off-axis geometry, single shot off-axis interferogram was obtained by tilting the reference and the object wave of the off-axis interferogram was reconstructed in the central region of the observation plane by using the digital reference wave concept. The demodulated phase map was obtained and unwrapped to remove the 2π ambiguity. The unwrapped phase map was converted to height and the sagittal length that used for curvature measurement was calculated accurately. The results extracted from phase shifting in-line interferometry and single shot off-axis geometry methods were compared with the results extracted from single shot Zernike's polynomial fitting method and the results were in excellent agreement. A new trial was done to overcome the fringes produced from the object interfaces. Some factors of uncertainty which affected on the measurement were estimated in the order of 6.0 × 10^?5 mm or 0.003 dioptre (▽).     

A convergence study of a new partitioned fluid–structure interaction algorithm based on fictitious mass and damping

We develop, analyze and validate a new method for simulating fluid–structure interactions (FSIs), which is based on fictitious mass and fictitious damping in the structure equation. We employ a partitioned method for the fluid and structure motions in conjunction with sub-iteration and Aitken relaxation. In particular, the use of such fictitious parameters requires sub-iterations in order to reduce the induced error in addition to the local temporal truncation error. To this end, proper levels of tolerance for terminating the sub-iteration procedure have been obtained in order to recover the formal order of temporal accuracy. For the coupled FSI problem, these fictitious terms have a significant effect, leading to better convergence rate and hence substantially smaller number of sub-iterations. Through analysis we identify the proper range of these parameters, which we then verify by corresponding numerical tests. We implement the method in the context of spectral element discretization, which is more sensitive than low-order methods to numerical instabilities arising in the explicit FSI coupling. However, the method we present here is simple and general and hence applicable to FSI based on any other discretization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in applications involving 2D vortex-induced vibrations (VIV) and in 3D flexible arteries with structural density close to blood density. We also present 3D results for a patient-specific aneurysmal flow under pulsatile flow conditions examining, in particular, the sensitivity of the results on different values of the fictitious parameters.