A case of eosinophilic fasciitis and generalized morphea overlap

A 60-year old man developed skin hardening and edema on his extremities. Although he had been treated with oral prednisolone at another hospital, skin stiffness relapsed during tapering of prednisolone. At the initial visit to our department, physical examination showed skin hardening of the extremities and also symmetric erythematous macules on the back. Histological examination revealed fasciitis on the forearm and morphea on the back. Eosinophilic fasciitis is occasionally associated with morphea. However, cases of concurrent eosinophilic fasciitis and generalized morphea are rare. In the present case, CD34 was differentially expressed in both lesions, suggesting eosinophilic fasciitis and morphea are separate diseases with different origin of mesenchymal cells

Stress Intensity Factor for a Circumferential Crack in a Finite-Length Thin to Thick Walled Cylinder under an Arbitrary Biquadratic Stress Distribution on the Crack Surfaces

This paper presents the development of a practical method, by using prepared tabulated data, to calculate the mode I stress intensity factor (SIF) for an inner surface circumferential crack in a finite length cylinder. The crack surfaces are subjected to an axisymmetric stress with an arbitrary biquadratic radial distribution. The method was derived by applying the authors’ weight function for the crack. This work is based on the thin shell theory and the Petroski-Achenbach method. Our method is valid over a wide range of mean radius to wall thickness ratio, Rm/W ≥ 1, and for relatively short cracks with a/W ≤ 0.5. The difference between the SIF obtained by our method for the geometry and that from finite element analysis is within 5%. The method we developed describes the effect that cylinder length gives on the SIF. This effect needs to be considered for cylinders shorter than non-dimensional cylinder length βH≤ 5

Stress Intensity Factor Evaluation of a Circumferential Crack in a Finite Length Thin-Walled Cylinder for Arbitrarily Distributed Stress on Crack Surface by Weight Function Method

A weight function to evaluate the stress intensity factor (SIF) of a circumferential crack, subjected to arbitrarily distributed stress on the crack surfaces, in a finite length thin-walled cylinder was derived based on the closed form SIF equation previously developed by the authors. It is easy to evaluate the effects of structural parameters and stress distribution on the SIF with this weight function. Numerical examples confirmed the validity of the weight function. These examples showed that the effect of cylinder length on the SIF is quite large