No abstract

A highly sensitive, rapid and economical method for the determination of amlodipine (AM) in biological fluids was developed using a peroxyoxalate chemiluminescence (CL) system in a lab-on-a-chip device. Peroxyoxalate-CL is an indirect type of CL that allows the detection of native fluorophores or compounds derivatized with fluorescent labels. Here, fluorescamine was reacted with AM, and the derivatization product was used in a bis-(2,4,6-trichlorophenyl)oxalate-CL system. Fluorescamine reacts selectively with aliphatic primary amine at neutral or basic pH. As most of the calcium channel blocker and many cardiovascular drugs do not contain primary amine, the developed method is highly selective. The parameters that influenced the CL signal intensity were studied carefully. These included the chip geometry, pH, concentration of reagents used and flow rates. Moreover, we confirmed our previous observation about the effects of imidazole, which is commonly used in the bis-(2,4,6-trichlorophenyl)oxalate-CL system as a catalyst, and found that the signal was significantly improved when imidazole was absent. Under optimized conditions, a calibration curve was obtained with a linear range (10-100 µg/L). The limit of detection was 3 µg/L, while the limit of quantification was 10 µg/L. Finally the method was applied for the determination of AM in biological fluids successfully.

Control of transmitted power is crucial for the successful operation of multi-user wireless channels communications. There are practical situations in which the transmitted power cannot be adjusted by feedback information; hence, only forward transmit power allocation can be applied, especially in situations where a feedback channel is not available in a wireless network or when wireless nodes are only transmit types. Conventionally, transmitted power can be fixed. Higher gain may be observed if the sensors’ transmitted power is randomized. In this work, random power allocation for a Nakagami-m distributed wireless channel model was investigated, and a number of random distributions were evaluated theoretically and tested by simulations. The outage probability was evaluated theoretically and validated by Monte Carlo simulations.