Corni Fructus (CF) is a fruit of Cornus officinalis Sieb. et Zucc. and has been used as traditional oriental medicine. It has various functional qualities such as being antioxidative, anti-inflammatory, antidiabetic, antihyperglycemic, and immunity-regulating. In the current study, CF was extracted from two conventional extract solvents (distilled water (DW) and 70% ethanol) with/without high-speed homogenization (HSH) treatments. The extract was characterized by measuring the total polyphenol contents and antioxidant activities. The HSH treatment significantly improved the total polyphenol content (from 28.4±0.9 mg/mL to 35.5±0.9 mg/mL), ABTS (from 59.8±0.4% to 78.4±2.7%), and DPPH radical scavenging activities (from 50.8±1.4% to 59.7±2.8%) of the DW extract and showed a level similar to that of 70% ethanol extract. The CF extracts were further used to prepare functional jelly with gelatin and other components such as pectin, fructooligosaccharide, and citric acid. The jelly’s hardness, springiness, gumminess, and cohesiveness were characterized using a texture profile analysis (TPA).

In the present study, exfoliated graphite nanoplatelets (xGnP) with different particle sizes were coated onto polyacrylonitrile-based carbon fibers by a direct coating method. The flexural properties, interlaminar shear strength, and the morphology of the xGnP-coated carbon fiber/phenolic matrix composites were investigated in terms of their longitudinal flexural strength and modulus, interlaminar shear strength, and by optical and scanning electron microscopic observations. The results were compared with a phenolic matrix composite counterpart prepared without xGnP. The flexural properties and interlaminar shear strength of the xGnP-coated carbon fiber/phenolic matrix composites were found to be higher than those of the uncoated composite. The flexural and interlaminar shear strengths were affected by the particle size of the xGnP, while the particle size had no significant effect on the flexural modulus. It seems that the interfacial contacts between the xGnP-coated carbon fibers and the phenolic matrix play a role in enhancing the flexural strength as well as the interlaminar shear strength of the composites.

This paper presents a collaborative product development architecture (cPDA) using multi-agents which provides a framework for the design and analysis tools to effectively communicate and collaborate. This paper addresses two key issues. One is concerned with product visualization and real-time collaboration over the Internet. It discusses the light-weight geometric representation of the product information for efficient transmission and sharing over the Internet. The other is concerned with the collaborative process management using multi-agents. The collaborative product development process is globally managed by the process manager, but locally managed by agent interactions, which combines the advantage of the hierarchical management of the process with the heterarchical one.

Progressive mesh representation and generation have become one of the most important issues in network-based computer graphics. However, current researches are mostly focused on triangular mesh models. On the other hand, solid models are widely used in industry and are applied to advanced applications such as product design and virtual assembly. Moreover, as the demand to share and transmit these solid models over the network is emerging, the representation and the generation of progressive solid models depending on specific engineering needs and purpose are essential. In this paper, we present a Cellular Topology-based approach to generating progressive solid models from a feature-based solid model. The proposed approach introduces a new scheme for storing and transmitting solid models over the network. The Cellular Topology approach makes it possible to effectively generate progressive solid models and to efficiently transmit the models over the network.

Geometric shape morphing is a special geometric operation that interpolates two geometric shapes to generate in-between shapes, which can be used in various design applications such as pipe-like surface design or motion simulation in CAD/CAM. It has been well known that Minkowski sum can be used to design collision-free motion path and to modify geometric shapes. Recently, we developed a geometric modeling technique to interactively control geometric shape morphing based on Minkowski sum. The basic idea develops from the linear interpolation on two geometric shapes where the traditional algebraic sum is replaced by Minkowski sum. We extended this scheme into n-th degree B？zier and blossom control with multiple control shapes. In this paper, we introduce mathematical models of the proposed control structure and some of their properties. Moreover, we present a fast and efficient computation method based on direction map analysis, which has been optimized for repeated generation of in-betweens to outperform previous algorithms.