Many arthropods and small vertebrates use adhesive pads for climbing. These biological adhesives have to meet conflicting demands: attachment must be strong and reliable, yet detachment should be fast and effortless. Climbing animals can rapidly and reversibly control their pads' adhesive strength by shear forces, but the mechanisms underlying this coupling have remained unclear. Here, we show ...

Lower-limb complications associated with diabetes include the development of plantar ulcers that can lead to infection and subsequent amputation. While we know from force-plate analyses that medial/lateral and anterior/posterior shear components of ground-reaction forces exist, little is known about the actual distribution of these stresses during daily activities or about the role that shear s...

We investigated the effects of particle shape on shear thickening in densely packed suspensions. Rods of different aspect ratios and nonconvex hooked rods were fabricated. Viscosity curves and normal stresses were measured using a rheometer for a wide range of packing fractions for each shape. Suspensions of each shape exhibit qualitatively similar discontinuous shear thickening. The logarithmi...

The experimental study introduces an unload-induced direct-shear model to investigate the frictional slip of a layer of simulated granular gouges induced by the combination of a decreasing normal stress and a constant shear stress. A frictional equilibrium state of the gouge layer is initially established under fixed normal and shear stresses. The normal stress is proposed to decrease at a cons...

The mechanics of cracking in fiber-reinforced ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) under general loadings remains incomplete. The present paper addresses one outstanding aspect of this problem: the development of matrix cracks in unidirectional plies under shear loading. To this end, we develop a model based on potential energy differences upstream and downstream of a fully bridged steady-state mat...

Fruits from many citrus cultivars develop depressed areas in the flavedo (outer part of the peel) and albedo (inner part) following detachment. Although ultrastructural analysis may provide important information about multiple plant responses to stresses and external stimuli at the cell and tissue levels, and despite the proved efficacy of ethylene in reducing peel damage in citrus fruit, cytol...

a 5th order shear deformation theory considering transverse shear deformation effect as well as transverse normal strain deformation effect is presented for static flexure   analysis of simply supported isotropic plate. the assumed displacement field accounts for non-linear variation of in-plane displacements as well as transverse displacement through the plate thickness. the condition of zero ...

Endothelial cells are constantly exposed to fluid shear stresses that regulate vascular morphogenesis, homeostasis, and disease. The mechanical responses of endothelial cells to relatively high shear flow such as that characteristic of arterial circulation has been extensively studied. Much less is known about the responses of endothelial cells to slow shear flow such as that characteristic of ...

[1] Field studies suggest that bedrock incision by granular flows may be the primary process cutting valleys in steep, unglaciated landscapes. An expression has been proposed for debris flow incision into bedrock which posits that erosion rate depends on stresses due to granular interactions at the snout of debris flows. Here, we explore this idea by conducting laboratory experiments to test th...

Perturbation(s) in the adhesive’s properties originating from manufacturing, glue-line application method and in-service conditions, may lead to poor performance of bonded systems. Herein, effect such uncertainties on adhesive stresses is analyzed via a probabilistic mechanics framework built continuum-based theoretical model. Firstly, generic 2D plane stress/strain linear-elastic model for com...