BackgroundAccording to the anatomic characteristics of the calcaneus and the sinus tarsi approach, we designed a combined plate. The goal of this study was to retrospectively assess the functional outcomes and complications of treatment with our self-designed plate.MethodsFrom March 2014 to October 2015, 18 patients with closed calcaneal fractures (14 Sanders type II and 4 type III) were treated with our combined locking plate through a minimally invasive sinus tarsi approach. All patients underwent both clinical and radiological evaluations.ResultsThe follow-up duration for all patients ranged from 6 to 13.5 months. The radiographs demonstrated significant corrections of the calcaneal width, length, height, Böhler angle, and Gissane angle from preoperatively to 3 months postoperatively and the last follow-up. However, there were no significant differences in the variables between 3 months postoperatively and the last follow-up. The mean Maryland foot score was 88.1 ± 8.8, in which excellent outcomes were achieved in 11 patients, good in 4, and fair in 3 (excellent and good rate, 83.3% (15 of 18)). No statistical significances in the mean Maryland foot score (88.1 ± 8.8 vs 87.8 ± 10.1, p = 0.9), and the excellent and good rate (85.7 vs 75.0%, p = 1.0) was found between type II and type III fractures. No complications were observed in all fractured feet.ConclusionTreatment with our self-designed combined plate through a sinus tarsi approach may be safe and effective for type II and type III calcaneal fractures.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13018-016-0497-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Abstract. Assessment of pavement working state and service life is really meaningful for traffic security, design evaluation and road maintenance. However, this job seems to be a mission impossible, because it is unimaginable to learn exactly how a pavement works inside when the construction is finished. As a result, in this paper, current situation of pavement-design theory and testing methods was summarized, and at the same time the concept of Pavement Structural Health Monitoring (PSHM) was introduced, followed by the explanation of the FBG sensing component's basic theory. Then, an engineering application of utilizing FBG sensors in actual pavement was introduced, the monitoring effect was shown. Conclusions were that PSHM was of great importance and utilizing FBG sensors in PSHM was effective.

Friction plate, the key part of the planetary transmission, is often damaged by the impact of the geer mesh. And the reason of the impact damage is not known yet. The backlash of the friction plate is crucial to the impact damage, thus the relationship of the backlash and impact damage is dissgussed in this study.The mathematic model is built up to calculate the impact force and the ADAMS dynamics simulation software is used to check the result of the mathematic model and get the dynamic characteristics of the impact force and provide the basis for the optimizing of backlash. Keywords: friction plate;impact of geer mesh;geer backlash;mathematic model

Double precision floating point matrix operations are wildly used in a variety of engineering and scientific computing applications. However, it’s inefficient to achieve these operations using software approaches on general purpose processors. In order to reduce the processing time and satisfy the real-time demand, a reconfigurable coprocessor for double precision floating point matrix algorithms is proposed in this paper. The coprocessor is embedded in a Multi-Processor System on Chip (MPSoC), cooperates with an ARM core and a DSP core for high-performance control and calculation. One algorithm in GPS applications is taken for example to illustrate the efficiency of the coprocessor proposed in this paper. The experiment result shows that the coprocessor can achieve speedup a factor of 50 for the quaternion algorithm of attitude solution in inertial navigation application compare with software execution time of a TI C6713 DSP. The coprocessor is implemented in SMIC 0.13μm CMOS technology, the synthesis time delay is 9.75ns, and the power consumption is 63.69 mW when it works at 100MHz.