Many mammals forage and burrow in dark constrained spaces. Touch through facial whiskers is important during these activities, but the close quarters makes whisker deployment challenging. The diverse shapes of facial whiskers reflect distinct ecological niches. Rodent whiskers are conical, often with a remarkably linear taper. Here we use theoretical and experimental methods to analyze interact...

Although cementless revision arthroplasty of the hip has become the gold standard, revision arthroplasty of the distal femur is controversial. This study evaluated the anchoring principles of different femoral revision stem designs in extended bone defect situations, taking into account the anatomical conditions of the proximal and distal femur, and the resulting primary stability. Cementless p...

Buckling analyses of heavily corrugated cylindrical shells based on detailed full finite element models are usually computationally expensive. To address this issue, we have proposed an efficient computational method of predicting the onset of buckling for corrugated cylindrical shells which builds on the Bloch wave method for infinitely periodic structures. We modified the traditional Bloch wa...

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) capsid proteins spontaneously assemble around the genome into a protective protein shell called the capsid, which can take on a variety of shapes broadly classified as conical, cylindrical, and irregular. The majority of capsids seen in in vivo studies are conical in shape, while in vitro experiments have shown a preference for cylindrical capsids. The factors...

Nearly all previous discussion on beaming effects in gamma-ray bursts have assumed a conical geometry. However, more and more observations on relativistic jets in radio galaxies, active galactic nuclei, and “microquasars” in the Galaxy have shown that many of these outflows are not conical, but cylindrical, i.e., they maintain constant cross sections at large scales. Thus it is necessary to dis...

This study deals with the vibrational behavior of two joined cross-ply laminated conical shells. Natural frequencies and mode shapes are investigated. Joined conical shells can be considered as a general case for joined cylindrical-conical shells, joined cylinderplates or cone-plates, cylindrical and conical shells with stepped thicknesses and also annular plates. Governing equations are obtain...

Biased Brownian motion of point-size particles in a three-dimensional tube with varying cross-section is investigated. In the fashion of our recent work, Martens et al. [Phys. Rev. E 83, 051135 (2011)] we employ an asymptotic analysis to the stationary probability density in a geometric parameter of the tube geometry. We demonstrate that the leading order term is equivalent to the Fick-Jacobs a...