Instability of Compacted Residual Soil

Static liquefaction of loose sands has been observed to initiate at stress ratios far less than the steady-state stress ratio. Different collapse surface concepts largely based on undrained triaxial test results have been proposed in the literature to explain the above instability phenomenon of loose sands. Studies of the instability behavior of fill material derived from residual soils remain limited. The present study investigated the instability behavior of a compacted residual soil using the conventional undrained triaxial tests and specially equipped constant shear triaxial tests. The test results were characterized in the p’: q: v space using the current state parameter with respect to the steady-state line for the residual soil. A modified collapse surface that has gradients varying with p’ and v was proposed for the loose residual soil to represent the instability states of undrained loading. Under constant shear stress conditions, the soil can mobilize stress ratios higher than those defined by the modified collapse surface. An instability surface was therefore presented for the instability states reached in static loading. Further, an alternative method of deducing the instability surface from the undrained stress paths was introduced.

Mechanical Forces Impacting Cleavage of Von Willebrand Factor in Laminar and Turbulent Blood Flow

Von Willebrand factor (VWF) is a large multimeric hemostatic protein. VWF is critical in arresting platelets in regions of high shear stress found in blood circulation. Excessive cleavage of VWF that leads to reduced VWF multimer size in plasma can cause acquired von Willebrand syndrome, which is a bleeding disorder found in some heart valve diseases and in patients receiving mechanical circulatory support. It has been proposed that hemodynamics (blood flow) found in these environments ultimately leads to VWF cleavage. In the context of experiments reported in the literature, scission theory, developed for polymers, is applied here to provide insight into flow that can produce strong extensional forces on VWF that leads to domain unfolding and exposure of a cryptic site for cleavage through a metalloproteinase. Based on theoretical tensile forces, laminar flow only enables VWF cleavage when shear rate is large enough (>2800 s−1) or when VWF is exposed to constant shear stress for nonphysiological exposure times (>20 min). Predicted forces increase in turbulence, increasing the chance for VWF cleavage. These findings can be used when designing blood-contacting medical devices by providing hemodynamic limits to these devices that can otherwise lead to acquired von Willebrand syndrome.

Connection between Classical Solutions of Stokes first Problem and those of Simple Couette Flow. Applications

The classical solutions of the first problem of Stokes for viscous fluids, as it was to be expected, are obtained as limiting cases of those of the simple Couette flow. Something similar is valid for the motions of the fluids induced by a constant shear stress on the boundary. As a direct consequence, new exact solutions are immediately obtained for other two classes of motions of the same fluids.

Permanent solutions for some oscillatory motions of fluids with power-law dependence of viscosity on the pressure and shear stress on the boundary

In this paper, we provide simple expressions for the permanent solutions corresponding to some oscillatory motions of two classes of Newtonian fluids with power-law dependence of viscosity on the pressure between two infinite horizontal parallel plates. The fluid motion is generated by the lower plate that applies an oscillatory shear stress to the fluid. Such solutions, which are lack in the existing literature, can be useful both for those who want to eliminate the transients from their experiments and as tests to verify numerical schemes that are developed to study complex unsteady flow problems of these fluids. The similar solutions corresponding to the motion due to a constant shear stress on the boundary are also determined and, contrary to our expectations, the shear stresses are constant on the whole flow domain although the associated velocity fields depend both of the spatial variable and the dimensionless pressure-viscosity coefficient. Finally, for validation, some comparative graphical illustrations are included and the convergence of starting solutions to the permanent solutions is graphically proved. Spatial profiles of starting solutions are also provided.

On the Degree of Irreversibility of Friction in Sheared Soft Adhesive Contacts

A number of authors have experimentally assessed the influence of friction on adhesive contacts, and generally the contact area has been found to decrease due to tangential shear stresses at the interface. The decrease is however generally much smaller than that predicted already by the Savkoor and Briggs 1977 classical theory using “brittle” fracture mechanics mixed mode model extending the JKR (Griffith like) solution to the contact problem. The Savkoor and Briggs theory has two strong assumptions, namely that (i) shear tractions are also singular at the interface, whereas they have been found to follow a rather constant distribution, and that (ii) no dissipation occurs in the contact. While assumption (ii) has been extensively discussed in the Literature the role of assumption (i) remained unclear. We show that assuming entirely reversible slip at the interface with a constant shear stress fracture mechanics model leads to results almost indistinguishable from the Savkoor and Briggs model (and further in disagreement with experiments), hence it is assumption (ii) that critically affects the results. We analyze a large set of experimental data from Literature and show that the degree of irreversibility of friction can vary by orders of magnitude, despite similar materials and geometries, depending on the velocity at which the tangential load is applied.