Chronic allodynia stemming from peripheral stump neuromas can persist for extended periods, significantly compromising patients’ quality of life. Conventional managements for nerve stumps have demonstrated limited effectiveness in ensuring their orderly termination. In this study, we present a spatially confined conduit strategy, designed to enhance the self-organization of regenerating nerves after truncation. This innovative approach elegantly enables the autonomous slowing of axonal outgrowth in response to the gradually constricting space, concurrently suppressing neuroinflammation through YAP-mediated mechanotransduction activation. Meanwhile, the decelerating axons exhibit excellent alignment and remyelination, thereby helping to prevent failure modes in nerve self-organization, such as axonal twisting in congested regions and overgrowth beyond the conduit’s capacity. Additionally, proteins associated with mechanical allodynia, including TRPA1 and CGRP, exhibit a gradual reduction in expression as spatial constraints tighten, a trend inversely validated by the administration of the YAP-targeted inhibitor Verteporfin. This spatially confined conduit strategy significantly alleviates allodynia, thus preventing autotomy behavior and reducing pain-induced gait alterations.
12 March 2023 in Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids
Island‐bridge architecture represents a widely used structural design strategy in the field of stretchable inorganic electronics, where flexible serpentine interconnects function as bridges to accommodate most of the deformation, while the islands residing functional devices exhibit minimal deformation. The mismatch of Young's modulus between the elastic substrate and the rigid islands usually leads to stress concentration, which is named the island effect. This phenomenon can significantly increase the risk of interfacial damage, such as debonding and tearing failure near the island. In this work, the mechanical model of the island effect under equal biaxial stretching is developed based on theoretical analysis, simulation, and experimental measurement. The scaling law of the displacement and strain distributions on the substrate surface illustrates that the ratio of the island radius to the substrate length is the main controlling parameter of the island effect, proved by the experimental and numerical results. The criterion distinguishing whether the island effect problem is axisymmetric is derived from this. Further, the deformation field in periodic array structure is predicted based on the theoretical model, demonstrating its potential for application in flexible electronic devices.
This study investigated the axial tensile performance of adhesively bonded T700/C204 carbon fiber composite and TC4 titanium alloy tubular single-lap joints under three distinct temperature conditions: room temperature, low temperature (−65 °C), and room–low–room-temperature cycling. Two configurations of adhesively bonded joints—composite–composite and composite–titanium—were tested. Specimens were designed to evaluate the influence of spew-fillet and perfect lap configurations on uniaxial tensile bonding strength across varying temperature environments. Analysis of the final failure morphology, stress concentration locations, ultimate failure loads, and load-displacement curves revealed that stress concentration and peeling stress were most pronounced at the ends of the bonded region, which served as the initiation points for failure. The adhesively bonded joints exhibited two distinct failure modes, strongly correlated with material properties and environmental temperature. The titanium alloy tubular joints predominantly experienced adhesive layer failure, while the carbon fiber three-way tubular joints were primarily characterized by fiber-tear failure. Environmental temperature significantly influenced the strength of the adhesively bonded joints. Specifically, the tensile failure limit of the bonded specimens subjected to low-temperature cycling (25~−65~25 °C) was approximately 61% higher than that observed under the room or low-temperature conditions. Furthermore, the experimental results demonstrated that a maximum failure load of 27.522 kN and a shear strength of 10.956 MPa were achieved. Notably, the presence of adhesive spew-fillet had a negligible impact on the bonding strength of the joints.