One observes that a considerable level of confusion remains about some of those aspects of irreversibility, entropy generation and ‘the arrow of time’ which actually are well understood. This demands that great care must be taken in any discussion of irreversibility to use clear-cut notions and precise language in order to be definite about which property follows from which assumption. In this ...

Article history: Received 5 July 2012 Received in revised form 25 September 2012 Accepted 29 September 2012 The fatigue crack growth of the nickel-based superalloy Haynes 230 was investigated at room temperature and 900 °C using digital image correlation (DIC). As expected, the crack growth rates at high temperature were much faster than at room temperature. However, the crack closure levels, w...

This paper analyzes decisions on emissions of a stock pollutant under uncertainty in a two period model. Decisions are based on a weighted average of expected utility (EU) and the MaxiMin criterion. I first show that more weight on the worst case (less weight on EU) may lead to increased first period emissions. The effect of learning possibilities on emissions is not clear in general, but depen...

This paper analyses the decision to invest to reduce the emissions of a stock pollutant under environmental uncertainty. It shows that this decision depends on the type and level of uncertainty. When uncertainty is small, there is no simple irreversibility effect because of the tension between environmental irreversibility (the stock of pollutant causes costly long-term social damages), and inv...

We investigate propagating fronts in disordered media that belong to the universality class of wetting contact lines and planar tensile crack fronts. We derive from first principles their nonlinear equations of motion, using the generalized Griffith criterion for crack fronts and three standard mobility laws for contact lines. Then we study their roughness using the self-consistent expansion. W...

Cells life follows a cycling behaviour which starts at cell birth and leads to cell division through a number of distinct phases. The transitions through the various cell cycle phases are controlled by a complex network of signalling pathways. Many cell cycle transitions are irreversible: once they are started they must reach completion. In this study we investigate the existence of conditions ...