The purpose of this study was to gain an improved understanding of the mechanical behavior of the intervertebral disc in the presence and absence of the vertebral endplates. Mechanical behaviors of rat caudal motion segments, vertebrae and isolated disc explants under two different permeability conditions were investigated and viscoelastic behaviors were evaluated using a stretched-exponential ...

In this paper, the discrete element method (DEM) approach has been applied to study mechanical behaviors of ceramic breeder ebble beds. Directly simulating the contact state of each individual particle by the physically based interaction laws, the DEM umerical program is capable of predicting the mechanical behaviors of non-standard packing structures. The program can also rovide the data to tr...

To what extent dorsal horn interneurons contribute to the modality specific processing of pain and itch messages is not known. Here, we report that loxp/cre-mediated CNS deletion of TR4, a testicular orphan nuclear receptor, results in loss of many excitatory interneurons in the superficial dorsal horn but preservation of primary afferents and spinal projection neurons. The interneuron loss is ...

Alterations of the axonal morphology are key signatures of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Although the pathobiology of axonal injury has been extensively investigated, the vulnerability of the axonal microcompartment over the soma was still misunderstood. We hypothesized that the soma and the axon of neurons display opposite mechanical behaviors, rendering the axon more sensitive to a mechanical...

0020-7225/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd doi:10.1016/j.ijengsci.2009.08.001 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +66 2 9869009x220 E-mail address: [email protected] (T. Leephakp Nowadays, Pneumatic Artificial Muscle (PAM) has become one of the most widely-used fluid-power actuators which yields remarkable muscle-like properties such as high force to weight ratio, soft and flexible structure, ...

hot rolling of a large ring of titanium alloy (lrt) is a highly nonlinear incremental forming process with coupled mechanical and thermal behaviors (mtbs) which significantly affect microstructure and properties of the ring. the feed rate of idle roll and the rotational speed of driver roll have major effects on ovality of the ring. in this paper, the effects of these parameters on the ovality ...

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A core-softened model of a glass forming fluid is numerically studied in the limit of very low temperatures. The model shows two qualitatively different behaviors depending on the strength of the attraction between particles. For no or low attraction, the changes of density as a function of pressure are smooth, although hysteretic due to mechanical metastabilities. For larger attraction, sudden...

The dynamic mechanical behavior of living cells has been proposed to result from timescale-invariant processes governed by the soft glass rheology theory derived from soft matter physics. But this theory is based on experimental measurements over timescales that are shorter than those most relevant for cell growth and function. Here we report results measured over a wider range of timescales wh...