PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

David A Kessler

Publications and source records attributed to David A Kessler.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2003

Stretching instability of helical springs.

We show that when a gradually increasing tensile force is applied to the ends of a helical spring with sufficiently large ratios of radius to pitch and twist to bending rigidity, the end-to-end distance undergoes a sequence of discontinuous stretching transitions. Subsequent decrease of the force leads to steplike contraction, and hysteresis is observed. For finite helices, the number of these transitions increases with the number of helical turns but only one stretching and one contraction instability survive in the limit of an infinite helix. We calculate the critical line that separates the region of parameters in which the deformation is continuous from that in which stretching instabilities occur.

Cholesterol↗
PubMed2003

Lissajous singularities.

Coherent optical Lissajous states are easily created by nonlinear processes such as second-harmonic generation (SHG). Singular properties of such states are discussed and illustrated theoretically with non-phase-matched SHG of an ellipse field containing a C point.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2002

Mode-I fracture in a nonlinear lattice with viscoelastic forces.

We study mode-I fracture in a viscoelastic lattice model with a nonlinear force law, with a focus on the velocity and linear stability of the steady-state propagating solution. This study is a continuation both of the study of the piecewise-linear model in mode I, and the study of more general nonlinear force laws in mode-III fracture. At small driving, there is a strong dependency of the velocity curve on the dissipation and a strong sensitivity to the smoothness of the force law at large dissipation. At large driving we calculate, via a linear stability analysis, the critical velocity for the onset of instability as a function of the smoothness, the dissipation and the ratio of lattice spacing to critical extension. This critical velocity is seen to be very sensitive to these parameters. We confirm our calculations via direct numerical simulations of the initial value problem.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2002

Frenet algorithm for simulations of fluctuating continuous elastic filaments.

We present an algorithm for generating the equilibrium configurations of fluctuating continuous elastic filaments, based on a combination of statistical mechanics and differential geometry. We use this to calculate the distribution function of the end-to-end distance of filaments with nonvanishing spontaneous curvature and show that for small twist and large bending rigidities there is an intermediate temperature range in which the filament becomes nearly completely stretched. We show that volume interactions can be incorporated into our algorithm, demonstrating this through the calculation of the effect of excluded volume on the end-to-end distance of the filament.

Journal Article↗