A new fail-safe, variable stiffness, and variable damping isolator (VSDI) device is designed, developed and tested utilizing magneto-rheological elastomers (MREs). This system provides a simultaneous controllable stiffness and damping. The performance of the VSDI is investigated experimentally under dynamic shear loads. The results demonstrate that this VSDI is capable of increase of stiffness ...

Matrix stiffness strongly influences growth, differentiation and function of adherent cells. On the macro scale the stiffness of tissues and organs within the human body span several orders of magnitude. Much less is known about how stiffness varies spatially within tissues, and what the scope and spatial scale of stiffness changes are in disease processes that result in tissue remodeling. To b...

The linear impulse response of axisymmetric jets is examined for a family of variable-temperature profiles typical of the potential core. The influence of jet heating, shear layer thickness, Reynolds and Mach number on the spatio-temporal stability of both axisymmetric and helical modes is investigated. The linear impulse response is retrieved from a numerical solution of the spatial eigenvalue...

Code design of Unreinforced Masonry (URM) buildings is based on elastic analysis, which requires as input parameter the effective stiffness of URM walls. Current approaches estimate the effective stiffness as fixed ratio of the gross sectional stiffness but comparisons with experimental results have shown that this does not yield satisfactory predictions. In this paper, a recently developed ana...

Rationally designed matrices for nerve tissue engineering and encapsulated cell therapies critically rely on a comprehensive understanding of neural response to biochemical as well as biophysical cues. Whereas biochemical cues are established mediators of neuronal behavior (e.g., outgrowth), physical cues such as substrate stiffness have only recently been recognized to influence cell behavior....

Influence of externally forced initial flow conditions on axisymmetric cavity shear layer were studied. A sinusoidally heated strip upstream of the cavity excited Tollmien-Schlichting waves which, after amplification by the boundary layer, were introduced to the cavity shear layer. By choosing forcing frequencies within the range of shear layer receptivity, it was possible to control frequency ...

Structural analysis of flexible pavements has been and still is currently performed using a multi-layer elastic theory. However, for thinly surfaced pavements subjected to light to medium volumes of traffic, the importance of non-linear stress-strain behaviour of unbound granular materials (UGM’s) requires the use of more sophisticated numerical models for structural design and analysis of such...

The propagation velocity of shear waves relates to tissue stiffness. We prove that a regular clinical cardiac ultrasound system can determine shear wave velocity with a conventional unmodified tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) application. The investigation was performed on five tissue phantoms with different stiffness using a research platform capable of inducing and tracking shear waves and a clin...

Formation of bacterial colonies as biofilm on the surface/interface of various objects has the potential to impact not only human health and disease but also energy and environmental considerations. Biofilms can be regarded as soft materials, and comprehension of their shear response to external forces is a key element to the fundamental understanding. A mesoscale model has been presented in th...

Enhanced resonance search (ERS) is a nondestructive testing method that has been created to evaluate the quality of a pavement by means of a special instrument called the pavement integrity scanner (PiScanner). This technique can be used to assess the thickness of the road pavement structure and the profile of shear wave velocity by using the principle of surface wave and body wave propagation....