Creep experiments on polycrystalline surfactant hexagonal columnar phases show a power law regime, followed by a drastic fluidization before reaching a final stationary flow. The scaling of the fluidization time with the shear modulus of the sample and stress applied suggests that the onset of flow involves a bulk reorganization of the material. This is confirmed by x-ray scattering under stres...

Deep inspirations (DIs) and airway smooth muscle fluidization are two widely studied phenomena in asthma research, particularly for their ability (or inability) to counteract severe airway constriction. For example, DIs have been shown effectively to reverse airway constriction in normal subjects, but this is impaired in asthmatics. Fluidization is a connected phenomenon, wherein the ability of...

Fluidized beds are being used in practice to gasify biomass to create producer gas, a flammable gas that can be used for process heating. However, recent literature has identified the need to better understand and characterize biomass fluidization hydrodynamics, and has motivated the combined experimental-numerical effort in this work. A cylindrical reactor is considered and a side port is intr...

The functional consequences of the differences in lipid composition and structure between the two leaflets ofthe plasma membrane were investigated. Fluorescence of 1,6-diphenylhexa1,3,5-triene (DPH), quenching, and differential polarized phase fluorimetry demonstrated selective fluidization by local anaesthetics of individual leaflets in isolated LM-cell plasma membranes. As measured by decreas...

in this paper, experimental data on the drying kinetics of corn in a packed and fluidized bed are presented. experimental research was conducted on a laboratory apparatus. corn was used as a material because of its significance in agriculture and the food industry. an analysis of the influence of the operational parameters (the drying medium velocity i. e. the fluidization number, the drying me...

BACKGROUND Cells resident in certain hollow organs are subjected routinely to large transient stretches, including every adherent cell resident in lungs, heart, great vessels, gut, and bladder. We have shown recently that in response to a transient stretch the adherent eukaryotic cell promptly fluidizes and then gradually resolidifies, but mechanism is not yet understood. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS I...