Owing to nonlinear viscoelasticity, materials often show characteristic features that resemble those of thixotropy. This issue has been debated in the literature over past several decades, and experimental protocols have proposed distinguish thixotropy from viscoelasticity. In this work, we assess these by carrying out experiments using polymer solutions, thixotropic clay dispersions, modeling ...

The result of Da Prato and Sinestrari [3] concerning the non-autonomous evolution operators of hyperbolic type for the equation u′(t) = A(t)u(t) + f(t), t ∈ [0, T ], w(0) = w0, is applied to the study of u′(t) = A(t) [ u(t)+ ∫ t −∞ G(t, s)u(s)ds ] +K(t)u(t)+f(t), t ∈ [0, T ], u(s) = φ(s), s ≤ 0, which models linear viscoelasticity. Here A(·) satisfies all the requirements of Kato’s semigroup ap...

To determine whether and to what extent one component of the extracellular matrix, fibrillar collagen, contributes causally to abnormalities in viscoelasticity, collagen was acutely degraded by activation of endogenous matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) with the serine protease plasmin. Papillary muscles were isolated from normal cats and cats with right ventricular pressure overload hypertrophy ...

We present the first direct imaging of a new hydrogel of lipid membranes containing polymer lipids. Freeze-fracture electron microscopy shows unambiguously that the hydrogel’s surprisingly large viscoelasticity is explained by a novel defect topology of interconnections between defects. The defects are spherulites with high membrane curvatures which are either isotropic or cylinderlike. A lower...