There is a clinical need for a functional tissue-engineered blood vessel because small-caliber arterial graft (<5 mm) applications are limited by the availability of suitable autologous vessels and suboptimal performances of synthetic grafts. This study presents an analysis of the mechanical properties of tissue-engineered vascular constructs produced using a novel single-step self-assembly app...

The phenomenon of buckling in compression of an elastic inhomogeneous medium under initial stress is well known. It is illustrated by the instability of a longitudinally compressed ‘elastic plate embedded in a medium of lower rigidity. Under a critical load buckling appears suddenly in the form of a sinusoidal folding of a certain wave-length. Such sudden buckling ,will, of course, not occur in...

Rocks are far from being isotropic and elastic. Such simplifications in modeling the seismic response of real geological structures may lead to misinterpretations, or even worse, to overlooking useful information. It is useless to develop highly accurate modeling algorithms or to naively use amplitude information in inversion processes if the stress-strain relations are based on simplified rheo...

A finely layered medium behaves as a homogeneous anisotropic medium at long wavelengths. When each layer is a transversely isotropic viscoelastic (TIV) medium, attenuation anisotropy can be described by a generalization of Backus averaging to the lossy case. We introduce a method to compute the complex and frequency-dependent stiffnesses of the equivalent viscoelastic, homogeneous, transversely...

We report measurements of two dimensional radial fingering in viscoelastic concentrated suspensions (pastes) of colloidal particles, in small surface tension conditions. The displacement efficiency, the average finger width and the fractal dimension for growth have been measured in a broad range of paste viscosity and driving pressure. The growth process appears to be fractal in all the experim...

The problem of failure of load-bearing structures by fracture is generally important in all phases of our society. It may concern small household items as well as expensive structures of civil or space applications and accordingly may cause varying degrees of economic distress. While the state of failure is usually easily determined as either “not failed” or “completely failed,” the estimation ...

In order to use optical tweezers as a force measuring tool inside a viscoelastic medium such as the cytoplasm of a living cell, it is crucial to perform an exact force calibration within the complex medium. This is a nontrivial task, as many of the physical characteristics of the medium and probe, e.g., viscosity, elasticity, shape, and density, are often unknown. Here, we suggest how to calibr...