Nonenzymatic glycation of connective tissue matrix proteins is a major contributor to the pathology of diabetes and aging. Previously the author and colleagues have shown that nonenzymatic glycation significantly enhances the matrix stability in the Achilles tendon (Reddy et al., 2002, Arch. Biochem. Biophys., 399, 174-180). The present study was designed to gain further insight into glycation-...

Leaky guided modes propagating along embedded fibers in a composite material can be used for characterizing the fiber-matrix interface. This principle can be applied to real composites containing small-diameter fibers by using laser interferometric detection of very fine lateral resolution on the order of a few microns. The main purpose of this paper is to develop the analytical tools needed to...

We analyze and compare different techniques to set up the stiffness matrix in the hp-version of the finite element method. The emphasis is on methods for second order elliptic problems posed on meshes including triangular and tetrahedral elements. The polynomial degree may be variable. We present a generalization of the Spectral Galerkin Algorithm of [7], where the shape functions are adapted t...

Hydrogels are widely used as in vitro culture models to mimic 3D cellular microenvironments. The stiffness of the extracellular matrix is known to influence cell phenotype, inspiring work toward unraveling the role of stiffness on cell behavior using hydrogels. However, in many biological processes such as embryonic development, wound healing, and tumorigenesis, the microenvironment is highly d...

In this study, the static stability of the grasp of a single planar object is analyzed using the potential energy method. Inprevious papers, we considered cases in which individual fingers were replaced by a multidimensional translational spring model, inwhich each finger is constructed with prismatic joints. Human hands and the most developed mechanical hands are constructed withre...

We study the preconditioning of the stiffness matrix which arises from the discretization of the Poisson equation using IsoGeometric Method (IGM). A study of condition number of stiffness matrices, resulting from NURBS based IGM, suggests that novel preconditioning techniques are needed for fast and efficient iterative solvers for the resulting linear system. As a first step towards preconditio...

A = aerodynamic stiffness matrix C = speed of sound E = complex Fourier matrix f , F = physical and modal forces h = height of stream tube j = imaginary unit K, M = stiffness and mass matrices NB = number of blades P, Q = modal transformation matrices p = flow pressure Q = flow mass flux at the boundary q = generalized (modal) coordinate s = distance along the boundary T = period of flow unstea...

This paper focuses on the performance evaluation of the parallel manipulators for milling of composite materials. For this application the most significant performance measurements, which denote the ability of the manipulator for the machining are defined. In this case, optimal synthesis task is solved as a multicriterion optimization problem with respect to the geometric, kinematic, kinetostat...

We study connections between vibrational spectra and average nearest neighbor number in disordered clusters of colloidal particles with attractive interactions. Measurements of displacement covariances between particles in each cluster permit calculation of the stiffness matrix, which contains effective spring constants linking pairs of particles. From the cluster stiffness matrix, we derive vi...

The stiffness of a parallel manipulator is not only concerned with its detailed structure but also affected by the allocation scheme of actuators. Even though the precise values of stiffness cannot be derived since the link structure is not definitive at the stage of mechanism design, the effect of the allocation of actuators on the mechanism stiffness can be qualitatively evaluated in order to...