Support material is often utilised in additive manufacture to enable geometries that are not otherwise self-supporting. Despite the associated opportunities for innovation, the use of support material also introduces a series of limitations: additional material cost, cost of removal of support material, potential contamination of biocompatible materials, and entrapment of support material within cellular structures. This work presents a strategy for minimising the use of support material by comparing the geometric limits of an additive manufacture process to the build angles that exist within a proposed geometry. This method generates a feasibility map of the feasible build orientations for a proposed geometry with a given process. The method is applied to polyhedra that are suitable for close packing to identify space-filling tessellated structures that can be self-supporting. The integrity of an FDM process is quantified, and using the associated feasibility map, self-supporting polyhedra are manufactured. These polyhedra are integrated with non-trivial geometries to achieve a reduction in consumed material of approximately 50%.
Nomenclature
Background: Asthma is a disease with chronic airway inflammation, whereby the airway hyper-reactivity increases. Oxidative stress balance plays a critical role in asthma. Objectives: The present study aimed to evaluate serum glutathione peroxidase (GPX) enzyme activity and selenium levels in patients with asthma. Methods: This case-control study was conducted on 64 children aged 1 - 5 years, 32 subjects as controls, and 32 subjects with asthma who were selected randomly. The serum GPX activity and selenium levels of the studied subjects were determined spectrophotometrically. Results: The present study showed that serum GPX activity and Se levels of patients with asthma were significantly lower than those of controls (P < 0.001, P < 0.05, respectively). Conclusions: Reduction of serum GPX activity and Se concentration in patients could have a potential role in the pathogenesis and modulation of asthma. Micronutrient supplementation of Se may be beneficial in asthma.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.