Many pharmacokinetic studies of paclitaxel formulations with or without Cremophor (CrEL) have been performed on experimental animals. However, limited studies describe the different pharmacokinetic behaviors of paclitaxel in animals. The different distribution of drug in blood fractions may have great effect on its pharmacokinetic behaviors. Our present study was designed to study the characteristics of paclitaxel distribution in human, rabbit and rat blood, by measuring plasma-to-blood ratio (PBR) of paclitaxel in vitro and in vivo, and analyzing the results of equilibrium dialysis of paclitaxel with erythrocyte, plasma and hemoglobin. It was demonstrated that the paclitaxel PBR values in rat, unlike those in rabbit, are most significantly different from those in human, which may be due to distinct affinity of paclitaxel to blood fractions among different species. The effect of CrEL on increasing paclitaxel plasma concentration and in vitro & in vivo correlation in animal PBR values were observed. The findings in this study are of significance in the evaluation of the newly developed formulations of paclitaxel.

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Dimensional control is one of the most important challenges in shipbuilding industry. In order to predict assembly dimensional variation in block construction of shipbuilding, a variation stream model based on state space is presented in this paper, which can be further applied to accuracy control. Both locating error and welding deformation are taken into consideration in this model, and variation propagation mechanisms and accumulative rule in the assembly process are analyzed, then, a model is developed to describe the variation propagation throughout the assembly process, finally, an example of flat block construction is given to provide this method is effective and useful.

Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) composites are being used in an ever-expanding set of applications. For new applications, SMA composites are being developed as metal-ceramic Functionally Graded Materials (FGMs) utilizing SMA as the metallic phase, which contain both high temperature resistance of the ceramic phase and the mechanical properties of SMA composites. Three models including Averaging Technique of Composites (ATC), Mixture Rule (MR) and Mori-Tanaka (MT) scheme are used to calculate the stress distributions of the system subjected to thermal loading, respectively. The results obtained from the analyses of an SMA-ceramic graded composite show that after transformation the stress in the SMA composite is lower than in the case of pure elastic composite under the same thermal loading. This decrease stress can result in an increase in temperature resistance and improved mechanical properties of SMA composites. This work will be explored through a parametric study to understand their influence on SMA composite design.