304 research outputs found
Stress management in composite biopolymer networks
Living tissues show an extraordinary adaptiveness to strain, which is crucial
for their proper biological functioning. The physical origin of this mechanical
behaviour has been widely investigated using reconstituted networks of collagen
fibres, the principal load-bearing component of tissues. However, collagen
fibres in tissues are embedded in a soft hydrated polysaccharide matrix which
generates substantial internal stresses whose effect on tissue mechanics is
unknown. Here, by combining mechanical measurements and computer simulations,
we show that networks composed of collagen fibres and a hyaluronan matrix
exhibit synergistic mechanics characterized by an enhanced stiffness and
delayed strain-stiffening. We demonstrate that the polysaccharide matrix has a
dual effect on the composite response involving both internal stress and
elastic reinforcement. Our findings elucidate how tissues can tune their
strain-sensitivity over a wide range and provide a novel design principle for
synthetic materials with programmable mechanical properties
Structural characterizations of the navigational expressiveness of relation algebras on a tree
Given a document D in the form of an unordered node-labeled tree, we study
the expressiveness on D of various basic fragments of XPath, the core
navigational language on XML documents. Working from the perspective of these
languages as fragments of Tarski's relation algebra, we give characterizations,
in terms of the structure of D, for when a binary relation on its nodes is
definable by an expression in these algebras. Since each pair of nodes in such
a relation represents a unique path in D, our results therefore capture the
sets of paths in D definable in each of the fragments. We refer to this
perspective on language semantics as the "global view." In contrast with this
global view, there is also a "local view" where one is interested in the nodes
to which one can navigate starting from a particular node in the document. In
this view, we characterize when a set of nodes in D can be defined as the
result of applying an expression to a given node of D. All these definability
results, both in the global and the local view, are obtained by using a robust
two-step methodology, which consists of first characterizing when two nodes
cannot be distinguished by an expression in the respective fragments of XPath,
and then bootstrapping these characterizations to the desired results.Comment: 58 Page
Similarity and bisimilarity notions appropriate for characterizing indistinguishability in fragments of the calculus of relations
Motivated by applications in databases, this paper considers various
fragments of the calculus of binary relations. The fragments are obtained by
leaving out, or keeping in, some of the standard operators, along with some
derived operators such as set difference, projection, coprojection, and
residuation. For each considered fragment, a characterization is obtained for
when two given binary relational structures are indistinguishable by
expressions in that fragment. The characterizations are based on appropriately
adapted notions of simulation and bisimulation.Comment: 36 pages, Journal of Logic and Computation 201
Reliability analysis of semi-automatic train door systems in service on today's rolling stock of the SNCB
This article analyses the reliability of semi-automatic train door systems that are in use on today’s rolling stock of the SNCB. For the analysis several databases of the SNCB concerning both operation and maintenance were thoroughly screened. These databases are briefly explained and scaling factors are applied to compare the performance of different series of rolling stock relative to each other. Conclusions are made out of the available data
Relative Expressive Power of Navigational Querying on Graphs
Motivated by both established and new applications, we study navigational
query languages for graphs (binary relations). The simplest language has only
the two operators union and composition, together with the identity relation.
We make more powerful languages by adding any of the following operators:
intersection; set difference; projection; coprojection; converse; and the
diversity relation. All these operators map binary relations to binary
relations. We compare the expressive power of all resulting languages. We do
this not only for general path queries (queries where the result may be any
binary relation) but also for boolean or yes/no queries (expressed by the
nonemptiness of an expression). For both cases, we present the complete Hasse
diagram of relative expressiveness. In particular the Hasse diagram for boolean
queries contains some nontrivial separations and a few surprising collapses.Comment: An extended abstract announcing the results of this paper was
presented at the 14th International Conference on Database Theory, Uppsala,
Sweden, March 201
Temperature-Responsive Polyelectrolyte Complexes for Bio-Inspired Underwater Adhesives
Adhesive proteins of marine organisms contain significant amounts of hydrophobic amino acids. Therefore, inter- and intramolecular hydrophobic interactions are expected to play an important role in both adhesion and cohesion. Here, we mimic the hydrophobicity of adhesive proteins by using temperature-responsive polyelectrolyte complexes (TERPOCs) with a high poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) content. Upon mixing aqueous solutions of PNIPAM-b-poly(acrylic acid)-b-PNIPAM and poly(2-(dimethylamino) ethyl methacrylate) (PDMAEMA), complexation between the oppositely charged polyelectrolytes occurs. At low temperatures, complex coacervate core micelles (C3Ms) with a PNIPAM corona are formed, and upon a temperature increase, the solution turns into a hydrogel by the formation of a network of hydrophobic PNIPAM domains. Consequently, an abrupt increase in viscosity is observed upon heating which facilitates injectability of the adhesive. The gelation temperature, Tgel, and (adhesive) strength of the TERPOC can be adjusted by altering the salt and polymer concentration, which changes the balance between the electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions. Despite the importance of hydrophobic groups in strong underwater adhesives, we conclude that TERPOCs with a high PNIPAM content (70 wt%) are unstable due to water release. Consequently, there is a limited amount of hydrophobic groups that can be inserted in this type of systems. Nevertheless, TERPOCs show promising and tunable properties for application as injectable underwater adhesives, for example in biomedical applications
Controlled mixing of lanthanide(III) ions in coacervate core micelles
This article presents a facile strategy to combine Eu3+ and Gd3+ ions into coacervate core micelles in a controlled way with a statistical distribution of the ions. Consequently, the formed micelles show a high tunability between luminescence and relaxivity. These highly stable micelles present great potential for new materials, e.g. as bimodal imaging probes
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