Silicone rubber insulation material is widely used for the external insulation of power systems. During the continuous service of a power grid, it will be seriously aged due to the influence of high voltage electric fields and harsh climate environments, which will reduce its insulation performance and service life and cause transmission line failure. How to evaluate the aging performance of silicone rubber insulation materials scientifically and accurately is a hot and difficult issue in the industry. Starting from the composite insulator, which is the most widely used insulating device of silicone rubber insulation materials, this paper expounds the aging mechanism of silicone rubber materials, analyzes the applicability and effectiveness of various existing aging tests and evaluation methods, especially discusses the magnetic resonance detection methods emerging in recent years, and finally summarizes the characterization and evaluation technology of the aging state of silicone rubber insulation materials.

Objective: Passive shielding is usually applied to block electro-magnetic interference (EMI) for portable very-low field MRI scanners, but it goes against the mobility of the scanners. Here, the reference channel-based active EMI suppression (AES) system was proposed to discard them. Methods: Different from the existing studies, this work started with analyzing the interference transmission paths and discovered that the human body coupling was the main path. Then, the “ring-” shaped EMI receiving coil designed here together with the electrocardiograph (ECG) electrode patch were used to suppress the human-body-coupled interferences. For the first time, the periphery data of the k -spaces of the RF coil and the EMI detectors were utilized to calculate the transfer factors in multiple frequency bands by using the least square method. The reference EMI signals were transferred to the interferences in the MR signal by multiplying the transfer factors in each frequency band, and the denoised MR signal could be obtained by subtracting the transferred reference EMI signals. Results: The prototype of the AES system was applied to a 50 mT unshielded portable MRI scanner. The in-vivo experiments indicated that the interference suppression rate of the AES system equipped with the “ring-” shaped EMI receiving coil could reach 96.8%. Meanwhile, the SNR of the images after interference suppression by the AES system equipped with both types of detectors was 97.2% of that of the images scanned inside the shielded room. Conclusion: The proposed AES system ensures that the portable MRI scanner works normally in unshielded environment. Significance: Our study provides a solution to make portable MRI scanners truly movable.

Objective: The use of a close-fitting roughly head-shaped volume coil for MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) has the merit of improving the filling factor and thus the SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) from the brain. However, the surface of the RF coil follows that of the head which makes it difficult to determine an optimal coil winding pattern. We describe here a new method to optimize a head-shaped RF coil with the objective of maximizing its SNR and RF-magnetic-field homogeneity for operation at ultra-low magnetic field (6.5 mT, 276 kHz). Methods: The approach consists of FEM (finite-element-method) simulation and linear programing based optimization. Results: We have implemented the optimization and further studied the relationship between the design requirements and the performance of the RF coil. Finally, we constructed an optimal RF coil and scanned both a head-shaped phantom and a human subject. Conclusion: The method we outline here provide new insight into the conductor layout needed for magnetic optimization of structurally complex coils, especially when tradeoffs between competing attributes (SNR and homogeneity in this case) must be made.

Burn depth assessment in clinics is still inaccurate because of the lack of feasible and practical testing devices and methods. Therefore, this process often depends on subjective judgment of burn surgeons. In this study, a new unilateral magnetic resonance imaging (UMRI) sensor equipped with a 2D gradient coil system was established, and we attempted to assess burns using unilateral nuclear magnetic resonance devices. A reduced Halbach magnet was utilized to generate a magnetic field that was relatively homogeneous on a target plane with a suitable field of view for 2D spatial localization. A uniplanar gradient coil system was designed by utilizing the mainstream target field method, and a uniplanar RF (radio frequency) coil was designed by using a timeharmonic inverse method for the UMRI sensor. A 2D image of the cross sections of a simple burn model was obtained by a fast 2D pure-phase encoding imaging method. The design details of the novel single-sided MRI probe and imaging tests are also presented.