Unsaturated soils in engineered geostructures like embankments or retaining walls may experience seismic compression during earthquakes due to particle rearrangement associated with large-strain cyclic shearing. Although previous studies have investigated volume changes drained shearing of unsaturated soils, undrained presents a more complex situation. During shearing, total volume, matric suct...

An enhanced version of the flexure-based microgap rheometer (FMR) is described which enables rheological measurements in steady state shearing flows of bulk fluid samples of PDMS with an absolute gap separation between the shearing surfaces of 100 nm – 100 μm. Alignment of the shearing surfaces to a parallelism better then 10 rad allows us to reliably measure shear stresses at shear rates up to...

The stress field near the tip of a crack in a plate subjected to membrane and bending loads and undergoing large deflections, is investigated by performing an asymptotic analysis in the context of von Karman plate theory. It is demonstrated that the character of the near tip fields is identical to those of the linear plate theory. However, the determination of the crack tip stress intensity fac...

Angora goats are known to be vulnerable to cold stress, especially after shearing, but their thermoregulatory responses to shearing have not been measured. We recorded activity, and abdominal and subcutaneous temperatures, for 10 days pre-shearing and post-shearing, in 10 Angora goats inhabiting the succulent thicket of the Eastern Cape, South Africa, in both March (late summer) and September (...

We used a ring-shear apparatus to examine the perpendicular permeability of sands with different mineral compositions to evaluate fault behavior around gas hydrate reservoirs. The effect of effective normal stress on the permeability of two sand types was investigated under constant effective normal stresses of 0.5–8.0 MPa. Although Toyoura sand and silica sand No. 7 mainly comprise quartz, sil...

By means of contact dynamic simulations, we investigate the contact network topology and force chains in two-dimensional packings of elongated particles subjected to biaxial shearing. The morphology of large packings of elongated particles in quasistatic equilibrium is complex due to the combined effects of local nematic ordering of the particles and orientations of contacts between particles. ...

In startup of steady shearing flow of two viscous unentangled liquids, namely low-molecular-weight polystyrene and -Dglucose, the shear stress catastrophically collapses if the shear rate is raised above a value coresponding to a critical initial shear stress of around 0.1-0.3 Mpa. The time-dependence of the shear stress during