Objective(s): Drug delivery through the skin can transfer therapeutic levels of drugs for pharmacological effects. Analgesics such as NSAIDs have gastrointestinal side effects and topical dosage forms of these drugs are mainly preferred, especially for local pains. Meloxicam is one of NSAIDs with no topical form in the market. In this research, we attempted to quantify the skin permeation of a meloxicam topical preparation and to show how permeation would be increased by using thymol as an enhancer. The effect of eutectic point of drug and thymol mixture on rate and extent of skin permeation was also studied.Materials and Methods: Different mixtures of thymol and meloxicam (2:8, 4:6, 5:5, 6:4, 8:2) were prepared and their melting point were obtained by differential scanning calorimetry. Then drug permeation was measured using diffusion cells and the Guinea pig skin.Results: Mixtures in ratios 5:5 and 4:6 of meloxicam / thymol showed a new endotherm at 149 and 140oC in DSC thermograms. The permeability of meloxicam from the creams containing 6:4, 5:5 and 4:6 ratios of meloxicam to thymol were 4.71, 15.2, 22.06 mg/cm2 respectively. This was significantly different from the cream of pure meloxicam (3.76 μg/cm2).Conclusion: This study set out to determine that thymol plays as a skin permeation enhancer and increases the meloxicam skin absorption and this enhancement is significant at the eutectic point of drug-enhancer mixture.

There is a great technical interest in solid-liquid equilibrium (SLE) of binary fatty acids. Mainly, these substances are used for the design, development, and operation of many industrial processes because of their application in many manufacturing fields such as the cosmetic, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. In this study, a technique is proposed for binary fatty acid mixtures to estimate the melting temperatures as a function of mole fraction in the solid-liquid phase equilibrium. Derivation of the Wilson model was developed to predict the melting temperatures and latent heat to achieve eutectic points of capric acid, undecylic acid, pentadecylic acid, and margaric acid binary mixtures. The results showed that in the all binary mixtures, the eutectic point is near to a lighter compound except capric+undecylic acid because of the lower melting temperature of undecylic acid compared to capric acid. Comparison of experimental and thermodynamic studies revealed the low deviations between measured and calculated values obtained in this study.

The purpose of this study is to provide an alternative design for the phase equilibrium experiment of naphthalene-diphenyl amine system, etc. in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory course with a green chemistry approach. In this proposed method, palmitic acid-pentadecanoic acid system has been used. The phase equilibrium diagram of this system shows a simple eutectic point. The proposed system, unlike solid-phase equilibrium systems-common liquid in physical chemistry lab, not only does not have environmental problems and is not harmful to human health, but its waste materials can be easily recycled. After reviewing the results, the melting point of 66. 4 ° C for palmitic acid and 60. 3 ° C for pentadecanoic acid was obtained. Then, the adaptation of the experimental data was performed with the proposed polynomials of Excel software and the enthalpy of melting of palmitic acid was determined as 60. 85 kJ per mole. Also, the eutectic point was observed around 57 ° C and molar fraction 0. 44 for palmitic acid.

Introduction In 2003 Abbott et al. reported a new generation of ionic liquid (IL) entitled deep eutectic solvents (DESs), a new class of solvents. DESs have two or three components with a large depression of melting points [1]. These ingredients involve a variety of ionic and neutral species and have the role of either hydrogen bond acceptors or hydrogen bond donors, which play the role of Lewis or Bronsted acids and bases [2]. Recyclability, low vapor pressure, and low toxicity are important properties of deep eutectic solvents. These Eco-friendly properties of deep eutectic solvents have attracted researchers' attention [2, 3]. Bio-oil and biofuel productions [4-7],...

Non-cooperative intelligent control agents (ICAs) with dedicated cost functions, can lead the system to poor performance and in some cases, closed-loop instability. A robust solution to this challenge is to place the ICAs at the feedback Nash equilibrium point (FNEP) of the differential game between them. This paper introduces the designation of a robust decentralized infinite horizon LQR control system based on the FNEP for a linear time-invariant system. For this purpose, two control strategies are defined. The first one is a centralized infinite horizon LQR (CIHLQR) problem (i.e. a supervisory problem), and the second one is a decentralized control problem (i.e. an infinite horizon linear-quadratic differential game). Then, while examining the optimal solution of each of the above strategies on the performance of the other, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the equivalence of the two problems are presented. In the absence of the conditions, by using the least-squares error criterion, an approximated CIHLQR controller is presented. It is shown that the theorems could be extended from a two-agent control system to a multi-agent system. Finally, the results are evaluated using the simulation results of a Two-Area non-reheat power system.

Background: Finding a reliable diagnostic method for brucellosis is the most challengeable problem. In this study we determined the optimal diagnostic cut-off point for ELISA test.Methods: We gathered 56 confirmed cases of brucellosis. Furthermore blood samples from 126 controls including 73 healthy controls and 53 without brucellosis febrile patients were collected. In all of the cases and controls ELISA Ig G and ELISA Ig M levels were measured and compared with each other by Box plot graph and the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. The sensitivity and specificity of ELISA Ig G and Ig M were fixed in different cut-off values and Ig G and Ig M levels yielding maximal sensitivity plus specificity were selected for determination of optimal cut-off point.Results: The nineteen patients had positive blood cultures for Brucella melitensis. The standard agglutination test results were 1/160 or more in 54 patients. The Box plot graph indicated a high degree of dispersion for Ig G and Ig M data in patients with brucellosis compared with febrile patients without brucellosis and healthy controls. We observed partial overlap for Ig M data (not for Ig G) between cases and controls. The area under ROC curve for discrimination of cases and healthy controls was more for Ig G than Ig M.Conclusions: The ELISA Ig G is more reliable test than ELISA Ig M in diagnosis of brucellosis. Using cut-off of 10 IU/ml and 50 IU/ml have the most sensitivity (92.9%) and specificity (100%) for ELISA Ig G test, respectively. 

Statistical Shape Models are used to interpret shapes. They include mean and variance of corresponding points of training shapes. One of the most important challenges in building statistical shape models is to establish correct correspondences among landmarks in a training set. In this paper, the non-rigid CPD (Coherent Point Drift) method is used to find correct correspondences among points. This method uses both Deterministic Annealing and a non-rigid scheme to register two shapes simultaneously. Then, the statistical shape model is built using a rigid transformation. The proposed method is evaluated using Compactness, Generalization ability and Specificity measures. The built model is compared to models created using the ICP (Iterative Closest Point), TPS-RPM (Thin Plate Spline – Robust Point Matching) and MDL (Minimum Descreption Length) methods by these metrics. The results show that the proposed method performs like the MDL regarding Specificity measure (0.21±0.06). The Compactness and Generalization ability measures of the proposed method are very similar to those for the MDL method. The run-time of our proposed method is about 68 seconds which is faster than non-rigid TPS-RPM and MDL approaches (390 and 3600 seconds respectively). Our results are superior to the ICP and TPS-RPM algorithms.