Intervertebral disc degeneration is accompanied by elevated levels of inflammatory cytokines that have been implicated in disease etiology and matrix degradation. While the effects of inflammatory stimulation on disc cell metabolism have been well-studied, their effects on cell biophysical properties have not been investigated. The hypothesis of this study is that inflammatory stimulation alter...

Abstract: Solving or approximating the advection-diffusion/dispersion equation (ADE) is a challenging and important problem and has thus motivated a great deal of intense research. A specific complication arises from the nature of the governing partial differential equation: it is characterized by a hyperbolic non-dissipative advective transport term, a parabolic dissipative diffusive (dispersi...

Upwelling jets flow alongshore in approximate geostrophic balance with the onshore pressure gradient induced by coastal upwelling. Observations of such jets have shown that they often move offshore downstream of capes, leaving a pool of upwelled water inshore. Comparisons are made between this behavior and the hydraulic transition of a potential-vorticity-conserving coastal current as it passes...

Data of two or more state variables are recommended for porous media flow parameter estimation by inverse modeling. In this context, it is desirable to minimize efforts and cost when measuring these variables. A method to analyze the suitability of different sampling alternatives to identify the flow parameters from transient flow experiments by inverse modeling is proposed and tested in a larg...

introduction: groundwater is the largest resource of water supplement and shortages of surface water supplies in drought conditions that requires an increase in groundwater discharge. groundwater flow dependson the subsurface properties such as hydraulic gradient (water table gradient or head loss in artesian condition) and hydrodynamic coefficients. the flow treatment is analyzed with an accur...

Shallow landslides on steep (>25) hillsides along Puget Sound have resulted in occasional loss of life and costly damage to property during intense or prolonged rainfall. As part of a larger project to assess landslide hazards in the Seattle area, the U.S. Geological Survey instrumented two coastal bluff sites in 2001 to observe the subsurface hydrologic response to rainfall. The instrumentatio...

Trees face the dilemma that achieving high plant productivity is accompanied by a risk of drought-induced hydraulic failure due to a trade-off in the trees' vascular system between hydraulic efficiency and safety. By investigating the xylem anatomy of branches and coarse roots, and measuring branch axial hydraulic conductivity and vulnerability to cavitation in 4-year-old field-grown aspen plan...

A new fracture-injection/falloff type-curve analysis method is presented for reservoirs containing slightly compressible and compressible fluids. Type-curve analysis augments conventional beforeand after-closure methods, which are also reformulated in terms of adjusted pseudopressure and adjusted pseudotime to account for compressible reservoir fluids. Unlike beforeand after-closure methods whi...

Hydraulic fracturing is an important method of reservoir stimulation in the exploitation of geothermal resources, and conventional and unconventional oil and gas resources. In this article, hydraulic fracturing experiments with shale, sandstone cores (from southern Sichuan Basin), and granite cores (from Inner Mongolia) were conducted to investigate the different hydraulic fracture extension pa...

Inverse optimization of parameters offers an economical means to infer soil hydraulic properties from in situ measurements of infiltration. We evaluated optimization strategies to inversely estimate soil hydraulic parameters using field measured tension disc infiltrometer data. We estimated the parameters n, , and Ks of the van Genuchten-Mualem (VGM) model, and a piecewise representation of con...