1,564 research outputs found
Correlation of mechanical factors and gallbladder pain
Acalculous biliary pain occurs in patients with no gallstones, but is similar to that experienced by patients with gallstones. Surgical removal of the gallbladder (GB) in these patients is only successful in providing relief of symptoms to about half of those operated on, so a reliable pain-prediction model is needed. In this paper, a mechanical model is developed for the human biliary system during the emptying phase, based on a clinical test in which GB volume changes are measured in response to a standard stimulus and a recorded pain profile. The model can describe the bile emptying behaviour, the flow resistance in the biliary ducts, the peak total stress, including the passive and active stresses experienced by the GB during emptying. This model is used to explore the potential link between GB pain and mechanical factors. It is found that the peak total normal stress may be used as an effective pain indicator for GB pain. When this model is applied to clinical data of volume changes due to Cholecystokinin stimulation and pain from 37 patients, it shows a promising success rate of 88.2% in positive pain prediction
Non-Archimedean character of quantum buoyancy and the generalized second law of thermodynamics
Quantum buoyancy has been proposed as the mechanism protecting the
generalized second law when an entropy--bearing object is slowly lowered
towards a black hole and then dropped in. We point out that the original
derivation of the buoyant force from a fluid picture of the acceleration
radiation is invalid unless the object is almost at the horizon, because
otherwise typical wavelengths in the radiation are larger than the object. The
buoyant force is here calculated from the diffractive scattering of waves off
the object, and found to be weaker than in the original theory. As a
consequence, the argument justifying the generalized second law from buoyancy
cannot be completed unless the optimal drop point is next to the horizon. The
universal bound on entropy is always a sufficient condition for operation of
the generalized second law, and can be derived from that law when the optimal
drop point is close to the horizon. We also compute the quantum buoyancy of an
elementary charged particle; it turns out to be negligible for energetic
considerations. Finally, we speculate on the significance of the absence from
the bound of any mention of the number of particle species in nature.Comment: RevTeX, 16 page
The influence of cluster emission and the symmetry energy on neutron-proton spectral double ratios
Emissions of free neutrons and protons from the central collisions of
124Sn+124Sn and 112Sn+112Sn reactions are simulated using the Improved Quantum
Molecular Dynamics model with two different density dependence of the symmetry
energy in the nuclear equation of state. The constructed double ratios of the
neutron to proton ratios of the two reaction systems are found to be sensitive
to the symmetry terms in the EOS. The effect of cluster formation is examined
and found to affect the double ratios mainly in the low energy region. In order
to extract better information on symmetry energy with transport models, it is
therefore important to have accurate data in the high energy region which also
is affected minimally by sequential decays.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
Blade Exit Angle Effects on Performance of a Standard Industrial Centrifugal Oil Pump
The effects of blade discharge angle on the performance of a standard industrial centrifugal oil pump of type 65Y60
were investigated experimentally as the pump handled both water and viscous oil. A one-dimensional hydraulic loss
model was established to identify such effects mathematically. The effects have been estimated analytically by using
the model at various viscosities. The results showed that the blade discharge angle has significant but equal influence
on the head, shaft power and efficiency of the centrifugal oil pump at various viscosity conditions. For any viscosity,
the total hydraulic loss in the impeller and volute rises with increasing blade exit angle. The diffusion loss in and
behind the impellers as well as the friction loss in the volute are noticed in the pump, especially for highly viscous
liquids. The hydraulic loss in the impellers is about 0.8-0.6 times the loss in the volute. In order to improve the pump
performance, the hydraulic loss in the volute must be kept as small as possible
Perfect mirrors and the self-accelerating box paradox
We consider the question raised by Unruh and Wald of whether mirrored boxes
can self-accelerate in flat spacetime (the ``self-accelerating box paradox'').
From the point of view of the box, which perceives the acceleration as an
impressed gravitational field, this is equivalent to asking whether the box can
be supported by the buoyant force arising from its immersion in a perceived
bath of thermal (Unruh) radiation. The perfect mirrors we study are of the type
that rely on light internal degrees of freedom which adjust to and reflect
impinging radiation. We suggest that a minimum of one internal mirror degree of
freedom is required for each bulk field degree of freedom reflected. A short
calculation then shows that such mirrors necessarily absorb enough heat from
the thermal bath that their increased mass prevents them from floating on the
thermal radiation. For this type of mirror the paradox is therefore resolved.
We also observe that this failure of boxes to ``float'' invalidates one of the
assumptions going into the Unruh-Wald analysis of entropy balances involving
boxes lowered adiabatically toward black holes. Nevertheless, their broad
argument can be maintained until the box reaches a new regime in which
box-antibox pairs dominate over massless fields as contributions to thermal
radiation.Comment: 11 pages, Revtex4, changes made in response to referee and to enhance
clarity, discussion of massive fields correcte
Minimal Unitary Realizations of Exceptional U-duality Groups and Their Subgroups as Quasiconformal Groups
We study the minimal unitary representations of noncompact exceptional groups
that arise as U-duality groups in extended supergravity theories. First we give
the unitary realizations of the exceptional group E_{8(-24)} in SU*(8) as well
as SU(6,2) covariant bases. E_{8(-24)} has E_7 X SU(2) as its maximal compact
subgroup and is the U-duality group of the exceptional supergravity theory in
d=3. For the corresponding U-duality group E_{8(8)} of the maximal supergravity
theory the minimal realization was given in hep-th/0109005. The minimal unitary
realizations of all the lower rank noncompact exceptional groups can be
obtained by truncation of those of E_{8(-24)} and E_{8(8)}. By further
truncation one can obtain the minimal unitary realizations of all the groups of
the "Magic Triangle". We give explicitly the minimal unitary realizations of
the exceptional subgroups of E_{8(-24)} as well as other physically interesting
subgroups. These minimal unitary realizations correspond, in general, to the
quantization of their geometric actions as quasi-conformal groups as defined in
hep-th/0008063.Comment: 28 pages. Latex commands removed from the abstract for the arXiv. No
changes in the manuscrip
Anisotropic behaviour of human gallbladder walls
Inverse estimation of biomechanical parameters of soft tissues from non-invasive measurements has clinical significance in patient-specific modelling and disease diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a fully nonlinear approach to estimate the mechanical properties of the human gallbladder wall muscles from in vivo ultrasound images. The iteration method consists of a forward approach, in which the constitutive equation is based on a modified Hozapfel–Gasser–Ogden law initially developed for arteries. Five constitutive parameters describing the two orthogonal families of fibres and the matrix material are determined by comparing the computed displacements with medical images. The optimisation process is carried out using the MATLAB toolbox, a Python code, and the ABAQUS solver. The proposed method is validated with published artery data and subsequently applied to ten human gallbladder samples. Results show that the human gallbladder wall is anisotropic during the passive refilling phase, and that the peak stress is 1.6 times greater than that calculated using linear mechanics. This discrepancy arises because the wall thickness reduces by 1.6 times during the deformation, which is not predicted by conventional linear elasticity. If the change of wall thickness is accounted for, then the linear model can used to predict the gallbladder stress and its correlation with pain. This work provides further understanding of the nonlinear characteristics of human gallbladder
Smearing of charge fluctuations in a grain by spin-flip assisted tunneling
We investigate the charge fluctuations of a grain (large dot) coupled to a
lead via a small quantum dot in the Kondo regime. We show that the strong
entanglement of charge and spin flips in this setup can result in a stable
SU(4) Kondo fixed point, which considerably smears out the Coulomb staircase
behavior already in the weak tunneling limit. This behavior is robust enough to
be experimentally observable.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, final version for PRB Rapid Com
Stability of Quantum Motion: Beyond Fermi-golden-rule and Lyapunov decay
We study, analytically and numerically, the stability of quantum motion for a
classically chaotic system. We show the existence of different regimes of
fidelity decay which deviate from Fermi Golden rule and Lyapunov decay.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
The early evolution of the H-free process
The H-free process, for some fixed graph H, is the random graph process
defined by starting with an empty graph on n vertices and then adding edges one
at a time, chosen uniformly at random subject to the constraint that no H
subgraph is formed. Let G be the random maximal H-free graph obtained at the
end of the process. When H is strictly 2-balanced, we show that for some c>0,
with high probability as , the minimum degree in G is at least
. This gives new lower bounds for
the Tur\'an numbers of certain bipartite graphs, such as the complete bipartite
graphs with . When H is a complete graph with we show that for some C>0, with high probability the independence number of
G is at most . This gives new lower bounds
for Ramsey numbers R(s,t) for fixed and t large. We also obtain new
bounds for the independence number of G for other graphs H, including the case
when H is a cycle. Our proofs use the differential equations method for random
graph processes to analyse the evolution of the process, and give further
information about the structure of the graphs obtained, including asymptotic
formulae for a broad class of subgraph extension variables.Comment: 36 page
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