The influence of polymeric dispersants containing different functional groups on TiO2 pigment particle suspension was investigated at pH 6.0 and 9.5, using rheology and particle size data. The dispersants chosen were polyacrylic acid and modified polyacrylamides including homo and copolymers modified with carboxylate and/or hydroxyl groups. The pigment suspension was strongly affected by both p...

An acoustically invariant one-word segment occurred in two versions of one syntactic context. In one version, the preceding intonation contour indicated that a stress would fall at the point where this word occurred. In the other version, the preceding contour predicted reduced stress at that point. Reaction time to the initial phoneme of the word was faster in the former case, despite the fact...

A theory of stress fields in two-dimensional granular materials based on directed force chain networks is presented. A general Boltzmann equation for the densities of force chains in different directions is proposed and a complete solution is obtained for a special case in which chains lie along a discrete set of directions. The analysis and results demonstrate the necessity of including nonlin...

The talk describes recent progress in understanding the behaviour of the stress tensor and its correlation functions at a critical point of a generic quenched random system. The topics covered include: (i) the stress tensor in random systems considered as deformed pure systems; (ii) correlators of the stress tensor at a random fixed point: expectations from the replica approach and c-theorem su...

The rheology of dense granular flows is studied numerically in a shear cell controlled at constant pressure and shear stress, confined between two granular shear flows. We show that a liquid state can be achieved even far below the yield stress, whose flow can be described with the same rheology as above the yield stress. A nonlocal constitutive relation is derived from dimensional analysis thr...

Amorphous solids increase their stress as a function of an applied strain until a mechanical yield point whereupon the stress cannot increase anymore, afterward exhibiting a steady state with a constant mean stress. In stress-controlled experiments, the system simply breaks when pushed beyond this mean stress. The ubiquity of this phenomenon over a huge variety of amorphous solids calls for a g...

The evolution of complexly folded septa in ammonoids has long been a controversial topic. Explanations of the function of these folded septa can be divided into physiological and mechanical hypotheses with the mechanical functions tending to find widespread support. The complexity of the cephalopod shell has made it difficult to directly test the mechanical properties of these structures withou...

It is well known that damage evolution models requires a length to avoid spurious localization. We gather these type of models under the name “non-local damage models”. In fact, non-locality is strictly needed only when the stress-strain curve starts to have a negative slope. Before this point, local models may be used. For instance, when damage exhibits some hardening, the stress-strain curve ...