We describe an unexpected constitutive transition in entangled polymer solutions. At and beyond a critical stress, the initial spatially homogeneous and well-entangled sample transforms from its entangled (coiled) state into a fully disentangled (stretched) state over a period during which the resulting shear rate increases in a spatially inhomogeneous fashion. In the mode of controlled shear r...

We propose a Widom-like scaling ansatz for the critical jamming transition. Our ansatz for the elastic energy shows that the scaling of the energy, compressive strain, shear strain, system size, pressure, shear stress, bulk modulus, and shear modulus are all related to each other via scaling relations, with only three independent scaling exponents. We extract the values of these exponents from ...

During cancer metastasis, circulating tumor cells constantly experience hemodynamic shear stress in the circulation. Cellular responses to shear stress including cell viability and proliferation thus play critical roles in cancer metastasis. Here, we developed a microfluidic approach to establish a circulatory microenvironment and studied circulating human colon cancer HCT116 cells in response ...

AIMS Caveolae are membrane microdomains where important signalling pathways are assembled and molecular effects transduced. In this study, we hypothesized that shear stress-mediated vasodilation (SSD) of mouse small coronary arteries (MCA) is caveolae-dependent. METHODS AND RESULTS MCA (80-150 μm) isolated from wild-type (WT) and caveolin-1 null (Cav-1(-/-)) mice were subjected to physiologic...

To study the effect of aging on deformability of an erythrocyte, rheological measurement has been performed after exposure to a shear field in vitro. Deformability was evaluated with shear stress responsiveness and with critical elongation calculated from an exponential curve between an elongation index and shear stress. Human erythrocytes were classified according to their density by a centrif...

This paper derives conditions for localized deformation for a transversely isotropic constitutive relation intended to model the response of geological materials in the axisymmetric compression test. The analysis considers the possibility of shear bands, with dilation or compaction, and pure compaction bands. The latter are planar zones of localized pure compressive deformation (without shear) ...

Forces deriving from blood flow shear modulate vascular adherence and transendothelial migration of leukocytes into inflamed tissues, but the mechanisms by which shear is sensed are unclear. In this issue, Fine et al. (2016. J. Cell Biol. http://dx.doi.org/10.1083/jcb.201603109) identify the guanosine nucleotide exchange factor GEF-H1 as critical for shear stress-induced transendothelial neutro...

Rheological characterization of high-solid sludge is a fundamental requirement for optimizing the mixing and transport of high-solid sludge during anaerobic digestion in waste water treatment systems. We investigate the time evolution of physico chemical properties and rheological characteristics of high-solid digested sludge with total solids (TS) 15–20 wt.% during anaerobic digestion. A serie...

Discontinuous shear thickening (DST) observed in many dense athermal suspensions has proven difficult to understand and to reproduce by numerical simulation. By introducing a numerical scheme including both relevant hydrodynamic interactions and granularlike contacts, we show that contact friction is essential for having DST. Above a critical volume fraction, we observe the existence of two sta...

We investigated the effect of shear stress on the sterol regulatory element-binding protein 1 (SREBP1) in vascular endothelial cells (ECs) and the mechanotransduction mechanism involved. Application of a shear stress (12 dyn/cm(2)) caused the proteolytic cleavage of SREBP1 and the ensuing translocation of its transcription factor domain into the nucleus. As a result, shear stress increased the ...