Simulations of a heavy ball falling through a sheared suspension.

In recent experiments, Blanc et al. (J Fluid Mech 746:R4, 2014) dropped a heavy sphere through a concentrated suspension of smaller, neutrally buoyant particles. They found that the application of a lateral oscillatory shear flow caused the heavy ball to fall faster on average, and that for highly concentrated suspensions, at certain moments of the cycle of shear oscillation, the heavy ball moved upwards.

Implementation of the Agitated Behavior Scale in the Electronic Health Record.

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to implement an Agitated Behavior Scale through an electronic health record and to evaluate the usability of the scale in a brain injury unit at a rehabilitation hospital.

Design: A quality improvement project was conducted in the brain injury unit at a large rehabilitation hospital with registered nurses as participants using convenience sampling.

Methods: The project consisted of three phases and included education, implementation of the scale in the electronic health record, and administration of the survey questionnaire, which utilized the system usability scale.

Instabilities and constitutive modelling.

The plastics industry today sees huge wastage through product defects caused by unstable flows during the manufacturing process. In addition, many production lines are throughput-limited by a flow speed threshold above which the process becomes unstable. Therefore, it is critically important to understand the mechanisms behind these instabilities.

Solid-solid contacts due to surface roughness and their effects on suspension behaviour.

Solid-solid contacts due to microscopic surface roughness in viscous fluids were examined by observing the translational and rotational behaviours of a suspended sphere falling past a lighter sphere or down an inclined surface. In both cases, a roll-slip behaviour was observed, with the gravitational forces balanced by not only hydrodynamic forces but also normal and tangential solid-solid contact forces. Moreover, the nominal separation between the surfaces due to microscopic surface roughness elements is not constant but instead varies due to multiple roughness scales.