Interaction with water causes shrinkage and significant changes in the structure of spider dragline silks, which has been referred to as supercontraction in the literature. Preferred orientation or alignment of protein chains with respect to the fiber axis is extensively changed during this supercontraction process. Synchrotron x-ray micro-fiber diffraction experiments have been performed on Ne...

We report on the fabrication and characterization of a polarization-maintaining multicore fiber. The fiber has 98 aligned cores, each with a birefringence of ≈2.3×10-4. The beat length, polarization extinction ratio, and polarization orientation are characterized.

Bone exhibits positive form birefringence dominated by and dependent upon the orientation of its collagen. The biomechanical efficacy of bone as a tissue is largely determined by collagen fibers of preferred orientation and distribution (and corresponding orientation of mineral crystallites), and evidence is accumulating to demonstrate that this efficacy extends to function at the organ level. ...

In the design of patient specific mathematical models of cardiac mechanics, the lack of patient specific input data leads to default settings of various model parameters. To estimate the potential errors thus introduced, we evaluated changes in predicted mechanics in a model of the left ventricle (LV) induced by changes in geometry, fiber orientation, heterogeneity of passive material behavior ...

This paper extends the work of Bird, Warner, Stewart, Sørensen, Larson, Ottinger, Vukadinovic, and Forest et al., who have applied Spherical Harmonics to numerically solve certain types of partial differential equations on the two-dimensional sphere. We present a systematic approach and implementation for solving such equations with efficient numerical solutions. In particular we are able to so...

fiber/ metal laminates (fmls) are hybrid composites consisting of alternating thin layers of metal sheets and fiber reinforced epoxy laminates. in this study, the effect of fiber orientation on impact properties of fml plates is investigated both analytically and experimentally. two groups of specimens were prepared and tested in two different levels of impactor energy. the indentation depth an...

Introduction: It has been shown [1] that one third of voxels in a brain volume include more than one orientation of fibre bundles. To better consider this condition, recently, HARDI methods such as q-ball, DSI, PASMRI, Spherical Deconvolution methods [2, 3, 4, 5, 6], have been proposed. These solutions have demonstrated to be more accurate to describe white matter in regions with complex tissue...

The organization of the major polymers in the wood fiber has a large impact on the properties of the structure. Numerous studies have been devoted to the cellulose microfibril arrangement, providing the longitudinal strength of the fiber, while less is known regarding the structural organization of other components, such as hemicelluloses and lignin. For the hemicelluloses, as being part of the...

the influence of nanoclay on the impact damage resistance of glass fiber–epoxy composites has been investigated using high-velocity repeated ice impact tests. the incorporation of nanoclay into epoxy enhances the impact resistance of the composites. the impact of ice is a realistic scenario for composite structures such as aircraft fuselages, wing skins and fan blades and it is not a completely...