failure of the quay walls due to earthquakes results in severe economic loss. because of hazards threatening such inexpensive nodes of national and international transportation networks, seismic design of quay walls is still an evolving topic in marine structural engineering. this study investigates the sensitivity of the gravity-type quay wall stability respect to uncertain soil and seismic pr...

A computer algorithm is implemented to construct 3D cubic pore networks that simultaneously honor nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mercury injection capillary pressure (MICP) measurements on core samples. The algorithm uses discretized pore-body size distributions from NMR and pore-throat size vs. incremental pore-volume fraction information from MICP as initial inputs. Both pore-throat rad...

A theoretical analysis is carried out to investigate the pore-fluid pressure gradient and effective vertical-stress gradient distribution in fluid-saturated porous rock masses in layered hydrodynamic systems. Three important concepts, namely the critical porosity of a porous medium, the intrinsic pore-fluid pressure and the intrinsic effective vertical stress of the solid matrix, are presented ...

We report here a non-invasive, reversible method for interrogating single cells in a microfluidic flow-through system. Impedance spectroscopy of cells held at a micron-sized pore under negative pressure is demonstrated and used to determine the presence and viability of the captured cell. The cell capture pore is optimized for electrical response and mechanical interfacing to a cell using a dep...

Methane hydrate formation and dissociation kinetics were investigated in seawater-saturated consolidated Ottawa sand-pack under sub-seafloor conditions to study the influence of effective pressure on formation and dissociation kinetics. To simulate a sub-seafloor environment, the pore-pressure was varied relative to confining pressure in successive experiments. Hydrate formation was achieved by...

Here, we report a first study of virus removal by a novel membrane filtration system, named the "Pore Diffusion". The "Pore Diffusion" manipulated the direction of circulating flow from vertical to parallel to the membrane, thereby achieved to alter the trans-membrane pressure as low as possible. We compared the viral activity between before and after filtration by both infectivity assay and re...