The fabrication of functional tissues is important for tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and biological research. While current 3D bioprinting technologies are hard to precise arrangement of bioinks (composed of cells...

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Research on circulating tumor cells (CTCs) is of great significance in cancer diagnosis, prognosis and even the development of personalized therapy.

Analytical methods are of great interest for the design and analysis of AC machines. This paper proposes a new analytical method to study the harmonic rotating components of the magneto motive force (MMF) produced by various types of armature windings and input currents. The windings can be symmetrical-phase or asymmetrical-phase, single-layer or multi-layer, fractional-slot or integer-slot, with arbitrary phase numbers. The analytical method is expressed as concise steps and closed-form equations, and its validity and reliability are verified by comparison to finite element analysis (FEA) simulations and experiments. As opposed to previous works, the proposed method establishes a more comprehensive quantitative relationship among the harmonics of the resultant MMF, the arrangement of armature windings, and the input currents. Practical implications of this method include enabling more accurate prediction of machine performance, as well as optimizing machine design in both quantitative and qualitative respects.INDEX TERMS AC machine, armature winding, MMF harmonic, analytical method, closed form equation.

The recovery of single circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the peripheral blood of cancer patients has great potential for the study of cell heterogeneity and cancer metastasis and the development of personalized cancer immunotherapy. Here we present nozzleless droplet generation with focused acoustic beams for cell encapsulation. The mechanism of droplet generation is sensitive to the pulse width and the droplet diameter ranges from 350 to 550 μm. The pulse width duration (520 μs) and cell concentration (5 × 103 cells ml−1) can be adjusted to obtain the maximum probability (11.61%) of single cell encapsulation. Three-color fluorescence is used to identify encapsulated cells in the droplet and target cells are extracted by microcapillarity for conducting single cell analysis. The reported method of using acoustic tweezers to eject the droplet has advantages of convenience, speed and biocompatibility while being non-invasive, and could become a powerful tool for encapsulating single CTCs.