case presentation the patient was a 65-year-old female with sps diagnosed 1 year before. assessments were performed, such as range of motion, muscle strength, pain, balance, and functional mobility. she had shoulder pain, with a score of 5/10 on the numerical pain rating scale for both shoulders. moreover, her muscle strength was impaired. although the patient could not maintain an upright posi...

Debonding of an inclusion from the surrounding matrix in the presence of a nearby crack tip is studied numerically. Finite element models of symmetric three-point bend configurations are implemented in conjunction with a stiffness degradation method and the maximum tensile stress criteria to investigate the influence of debonding on crack tip parameters. The geometry considered is a single edge...

Recently, we reported on the axial-shear strain fill-in of the interior of loosely bonded stiff elliptical inclusions in a soft background at non-normal orientations, and the lack of fill-in in firmly bonded inclusions at any orientation. In this paper, we report on the experimental validation of the simulation studies using tissue-mimicking gelatin-based phantoms. We also show a few confirmato...

We report detailed theoretical investigations of the micromechanics and bulk elastic properties of composites consisting of randomly distributed stiff fibers embedded in an elastic matrix in two and three dimensions. Recent experiments [V. Pelletier, N. Gal, P. Fournier, and M. L. Kilfoil, Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 188303 (2009)] have suggested that the inclusion of stiff microtubules in a softer, ...

A uniformly moving inclusion which locally suppresses the fluctuations of a classical thermally excited field is shown to experience a drag force which depends on the dynamics of the field. It is shown that in a number of cases the linear friction coefficient is dominated by short distance fluctuations and takes a very simple form. Examples where this drag can occur are for stiff objects, such ...

This paper describes on-going research into the development of new computational algorithms and software which combine parallelism, space and time adaptivity, implicit stiff solvers, and multigrid methods. Such software is necessary in order to be able to attempt three-dimensional simulations of fundamental solidification phenomena at physically relevant parameter values. The research builds up...

We study the equilibrium conformations of a lipid domain on a planar fluid membrane where the domain is decorated by a vector field representing the tilt of the stiff fatty acid chains of the lipid molecules, while the surrounding membrane is fluid and structureless. The inclusion of chirality in the bulk of the domain induces a novel budding of the membrane, which preempts the budding induced ...