The direct shear test is a widely used method of determining peak and critical state strength parameters for soil and for soil-manufactured material interfaces. However, stress conditions inside the box during shear are not well known. This paper presents a new micromechanics-based approach that modifies existing relationships between plane strain and direct shear friction angles taking into ac...

[1] Problems associated with shear zone development in the lithosphere involve features of widely different time scales, since the gradual buildup of stress leads to rapid and localized shear instability. These phenomena have a large stiffness in time domain and cannot be solved efficiently by a single time-integration scheme. This conundrum has forced us to use an adaptive time-stepping scheme...

This study uses large-eddy simulation (LES) to investigate the characteristics of Langmuir turbulence through the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) budget. Based on an analysis of the TKE budget a velocity scale for Langmuir turbulence is proposed. The velocity scale depends on both the friction velocity and the surface Stokes drift associated with the wave field. The scaling leads to unique profi...

Sensitivity tests based on a spectral nudging (SN) technique are conducted to analyze the effect of large-scale environmental factors on the movement of typhoon Megi (2010). The error of simulated typhoon track is effectively reduced using SN and the impact of dynamical factors is more significant than that of thermal factors. During the initial integration and deflection period of Megi (2010),...