Continuous Renal Replacement Therapy (CRRT) is more and more widely used in patients for various indications recent years. It is still intricate for clinicians to decide a suitable empiric antimicrobial dosing for patients receiving CRRT. Inappropriate doses of antimicrobial agents may lead to treatment failure or drug resistance of pathogens. CRRT factors, patient individual conditions and drug pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics are the main elements effecting the antimicrobial dosing adjustment. With the development of CRRT techniques, some antimicrobial dosing recommendations in earlier studies were no longer appropriate for clinical use now. Here, we reviewed the literatures involving in new progresses of antimicrobial dosages, and complied the updated empirical dosing strategies based on CRRT modalities and effluent flow rates. The following antimicrobial agents were included for review:

Small-scale physical model tests have been increasingly used to study the thermomechanical soil-pile interaction, but existing model piles are highly simplified and do not have representative thermal properties or the quasi-brittle mechanical behavior of reinforced concrete (RC). This study aims to overcome these shortcomings by presenting a new type of model RC. This consists of a mortar (plaster, sand and water) with copper powder added to tune the mixture's thermal properties, along with a steel reinforcing cage. Fine sand was used to represent geometrical scaling of the prototype aggregates to correctly capture quasi-brittle structural response. Adding copper powder content of 6% (by volume) matched the coefficient of thermal expansion and thermal conductivity of prototype concrete, without changing the axial and flexural properties of model piles. In 1-g soil-structure interaction tests, the model pile was able to serve as an effective heat exchanger for transferring heat from a water-carrying pipe embedded within the mortar to the surrounding soil. The model RC exhibited cyclic pile head settlement due to repeated pile heating/cooling.

This paper presents a comparative study of three different classes of model for estimating the reinforcing effect of plant roots in soil, namely (i) fibre pull-out model, (ii) fibre break models (including Wu and Waldron's Model (WWM) and the Fibre Bundle Model (FBM)) and (iii) beam bending or p-y models (specifically Beam on a Non-linear Winkler-Foundation (BNWF) models). Firstly, the prediction model of root reinforcement based on pull-out being the dominant mechanism for different potential slip plane depths was proposed. The resulting root reinforcement calculated were then compared with those derived from the other two types of models. The estimated rooted soil strength distributions were then incorporated within a fully dynamic, plane-strain continuum finite element model to assess the consequences of the selection of rooted soil strength model on the global seismic stability of a vegetated slope (assessed via accumulated slip during earthquake shaking). For the particular case considered in this paper (no roots were observed to have broken after shearing), root cohesion predicted by the pull-out model is much closer to that the BNWF model, but is largely over-predicted by the family of fibre break models. In terms of the effects on the stability of vegetated slopes, there exists a threshold value beyond which the position of the critical slip plane would bypass the rooted zones, rather than passing through them. Further increase of root cohesion beyond this value has minimal effect on the global slope behaviour. This implies that significantly over-predicted root cohesion from fibre break models when used to model roots with non-negligible bending stiffness may still provide a reasonable prediction of overall behaviour, so long as the critical failure mechanism is already bypassing the root-reinforced zones.

Thermally-induced ratcheting of a thermo-active pile is the accumulation of net and irreversible pile head displacement upon heating–cooling cycles. Although this kind of phenomenon has been observed in vertically-loaded piles in sand, it is unknown whether this exists in laterally-loaded cases, and also what underlying mechanisms occur under the thermomechanical flexural soil-pile interaction. This study presents a series of centrifuge tests and finite-element simulations of the thermomechanical behaviour of a laterally-loaded thermo-active pile in sand. A new model reinforced concrete (RC) was used in the centrifuge tests to realistically mimic the thermal and mechanical properties of a prototype RC pile. Ratcheting was evident in laterally-loaded piles and its extent was more significant when the working horizontal load is higher. The ratcheting phenomenon was attributed to the accumulation of soil plastic strain due to the cyclic mechanical loading induced by pile thermal horizontal expansion and contraction, soil dilation upon soil-pile interface shearing, and creep. The additional bending moment induced by the thermal action did not induce yielding within the pile. A subsequent numerical sensitivity study suggested that ignoring the softening behaviour of the sand would lead to underestimation of the magnitude of the accumulative thermally-induced pile head lateral displacement.