The direct shear test is a widely used method of determining peak and critical state strength parameters for soil and for soil-manufactured material interfaces. However, stress conditions inside the box during shear are not well known. This paper presents a new micromechanics-based approach that modifies existing relationships between plane strain and direct shear friction angles taking into ac...

[1] Problems associated with shear zone development in the lithosphere involve features of widely different time scales, since the gradual buildup of stress leads to rapid and localized shear instability. These phenomena have a large stiffness in time domain and cannot be solved efficiently by a single time-integration scheme. This conundrum has forced us to use an adaptive time-stepping scheme...

This study uses large-eddy simulation (LES) to investigate the characteristics of Langmuir turbulence through the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) budget. Based on an analysis of the TKE budget a velocity scale for Langmuir turbulence is proposed. The velocity scale depends on both the friction velocity and the surface Stokes drift associated with the wave field. The scaling leads to unique profi...

Sensitivity tests based on a spectral nudging (SN) technique are conducted to analyze the effect of large-scale environmental factors on the movement of typhoon Megi (2010). The error of simulated typhoon track is effectively reduced using SN and the impact of dynamical factors is more significant than that of thermal factors. During the initial integration and deflection period of Megi (2010),...

This paper reports a large-scale direct-test study of absolute pitch (AP) in students at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Overall note-naming scores were very high, with high scores correlating positively with early onset of musical training. Students who had begun training at age ≤5 yr scored 83% correct not allowing for semitone errors and 90% correct allowing for semitone errors. Performa...

Recently, clustering of inertial particles in turbulence has been thoroughly analyzed for statistically homogeneous isotropic flows. Phenomenologically, spatial homogeneity of particles configurations is broken by the advection of a range of eddies determined by the Stokes relaxation time of the particles which results in a multi-scale distribution of local concentrations and voids. Much less i...