Geometric modeling from the medical images in the CAD system to support prosthesis design

This paper presents an individual designing prosthesis for surgical use and proposes a methodology for such design through mathematical extrapolation of data from digital images obtained via tomography of individual patient's bones. Individually tailored prosthesis designed to fit particular patient requirements as accurately as possible should result in more successful reconstruction, enable better planning before surgery and consequently fewer complications during surgery. Fast and accurate design and manufacture of personalized prosthesis for surgical use in bone replacement or reconstruction is potentially feasible through the application and integration of several different existing technologies, which are each at different stages of maturity. Initial case study experiments have been undertaken to validate the research concepts by making dimensional comparisons between a bone and a virtual model produced using the proposed methodology and a future research directions are discussed.

Control of Limit Cycle Oscillation in a Three Degrees of Freedom Airfoil Section Using Fuzzy Takagi-Sugeno Modeling

This work presents a strategy to control nonlinear responses of aeroelastic systems with control surface freeplay. The proposed methodology is developed for the three degrees of freedom typical section airfoil considering aerodynamic forces from Theodorsen's theory. The mathematical model is written in the state space representation using rational function approximation to write the aerodynamic forces in time domain. The control system is designed using the fuzzy Takagi-Sugeno modeling to compute a feedback control gain. It useds Lyapunov's stability function and linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) to solve a convex optimization problem. Time simulations with different initial conditions are performed using a modified Runge-Kutta algorithm to compare the system with and without control forces. It is shown that this approach can compute linear control gain able to stabilize aeroelastic systems with discontinuous nonlinearities.

Mixed methodology to analyze the relationship between maturity of environmental management and the adoption of green supply chain management in Brazil

The aim of this research is to verify the relationship between the maturity levels of environmental management and the adoption of green supply chain management (GSCM) practices by electro-electronic companies in Brazil. In this work a two-phase research was conducted, with one quantitative and the other qualitative. The quantitative phase aimed to test whether a relationship between the maturity levels of environmental management and GSCM exists, while the qualitative phase tried to detail the characteristics of this relationship. The quantitative phase was conducted through a survey with 100 Brazilian electro-electronic companies and the collected data were processed using Structural Equation Modeling. For the qualitative phase, a multiple case study was conducted with three companies located in Brazil. The results indicate that: (1) The main hypothesis was confirmed and considered statistically valid, indicating that, indeed, the maturity level of environmental management influences the adoption of GSCM practices; (2) a coevolution tends to occur between the environmental maturity and the GSCM practices; that is, the more developed is the company's environmental management, more complex GSCM practices are adopted; and (3) the GSCM internal practices tend to present a greater relative adoption than the external practices; these external practices of GSCM tend to be adopted when the company is inserted in a higher environmental stage and/or operates under a scenario of stronger normative environmental pressure. By the way, this is the first research mixing survey and case studies on GSCM in Brazil. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The zero-inflated Conway-Maxwell-Poisson distribution: Bayesian inference, regression modeling and influence diagnostic

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)