Search results for "characteristic length"
showing 2 items of 22 documents
A smeared seismicity constitutive model
2004
The classical application of rate and state dependent frictional constitutive laws has involved the instabilities developed between two sliding surfaces. In such a situation, the behaviour and evolution of asperities is the controlling mechanism of velocity weakening. However, most faults have a substantial thickness and it would appear that it is the bulk behaviour of the fault gouge, at whatever scale, that is important. The purpose of this paper is to explore how bulk frictional sliding behaviour may be described. We explore here the consequences of applying the rate and state framework initially developed to describe the frictional behaviour at the interface between two interacting slid…
Reversible tuning of a block-copolymer nanostructure via electric fields
2007
Block copolymers consisting of incompatible components self-assemble into microphase-separated domains yielding highly regular structures with characteristic length scales of the order of several tens of nanometres. Therefore, in the past decades, block copolymers have gained considerable potential for nanotechnological applications, such as in nanostructured networks and membranes, nanoparticle templates and high-density data storage media. However, the characteristic size of the resulting structures is usually determined by molecular parameters of the constituent polymer molecules and cannot easily be adjusted on demand. Here, we show that electric d.c. fields can be used to tune the char…