Background and Aim: Diagnosing the status of the posterior ligament complex (PLC) plays an essential role in the management of patients with thoracolumbar fractures. In this study, due to the inefficiency of existing imaging modalities in the accurate detection of PLC damage, we investigated the relevance of some imaging parameters to specific guidelines for rapid PLC injury detection. Methods...

Nowadays, as a result of increased terrorist and bomb attacks throughout the globe in the vicinity of strategic buildings, designing these structures against impact loads, particularly the blast-related ones, has been taken into more consideration. The current procedure for designing the structure against an explosion is a design against the local failure of the current elements in the first st...

In this paper an issue of local damage detection in a rolling element bearing is discussed. The bearing operates in a hummer crusher, thus the vibration signal acquired on the housing contains a lot of impacts that originate in various sources. In the case of local damage detection it is crucial to find a set of cyclic impulses in the signal. These impulses are informative, in spite of impulses...

Local damage models are known to produce pathological mesh dependence in finite element simulations. The solution is to either use a regularization technique or to adopt a non-local damage model. Viscoplasticity is one technique which can regularize the mesh dependence of local damage model by incorporating a physical phenomenon in the constitutive model i.e. rate effects. A detailed numerical ...

An integrated and automated smart structures approach for structural health monitoring applications is presented. This approach, called Active Damage Interrogation (ADI), utilizes an array of piezoelectric transducers attached to or embedded within the structure for both actuation and sensing. The ADI system actively interrogates the structure via broadband excitation of multiple actuators acro...

The renin angiotensin system (RAS) recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. In 1898, renin was discovered by Tigerstedt and Bergman in rabbit kidney (Tigerstedt and Bergman, 1898). Renin turned out to be the rate limiting enzyme of a proteolytic cascade leading to the formation of angiotensin (Ang) I and Ang II. In this cascade renin splits the liverderived renin substrate, angiotensinogen (A...

The contribution presents an analysis of a rate-independent non-local damage model, recently proposed by Mielke and Roub́ıček (2006). An analytical as well as numerical solution of a simple one-dimensional bifurcation problem is performed, demonstrating that, for the elementary localization test, the model is free of pathological features.

An adaptive mesh refinement strategy is proposed for local damage models that often arise from internal state variable based continuum damage models. The proposed algorithm employs both the finite element method and the finite difference method to integrate the equations of motion of a linear elastic material with simple isotropic microcracking. The challenges of this problem include the time i...