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This paper presents experimental evidence for the damped-hyperbolic nature of transient heat conduction in porcine muscle tissue and blood. An examination of integer order and Maxwell–Cattaneo heat conduction models indicates that the latter, in effect resulting in a time-fractional telegraph (TFT) equation, provides the best fit to transient heat phenomena in such materials. The numerical method is verified on Dirichlet and Neumann initial boundary value problems using existing analytical results. Overall, the TFT equation captures the wave-like nature of heat conduction and temperature profiles obtained in experiments, while reducing the need for further tunable parameters.

The MRI-based computational model, previously validated by tagged MRI and harmonic phase imaging analysis technique on in vivo human brain deformation, is used to study transient wave dynamics during blunt head trauma. Three different constitutive models are used for the cerebrospinal fluid: incompressible solid elastic, viscoelastic, and fluid-like elastic using an equation of state model. Three impact cases are simulated, which indicate that the blunt impacts give rise not only to a fast pressure wave but also to a slow, and potentially much more damaging, shear (distortional) wave that converges spherically towards the brain center. The wave amplification due to spherical geometry is balanced by damping due to tissues' viscoelasticity and the heterogeneous brain structure, suggesting a stochastic competition of these 2 opposite effects. It is observed that this convergent shear wave is dependent on the constitutive property of the cerebrospinal fluid, whereas the peak pressure is not as significantly affected.

The fabrication and properties of pH-responsive colloidal particles are reported, which change shape rapidly (less than 200 ms), nearly independent of the diffusion of the pH altering species that trigger their actuation, and far more rapid than their Brownian motion. These particles are mechanically bistable, as revealed by their hysteretic shape response. Finite element analysis (FEA) shows that mechanical hysteresis and bistability derives from the colloids' spherical curvature. Mechanical characterization of the bilayered polymers comprising the colloidal particles shows that viscoelastic relaxation plays a non-negligible role in limiting the shape switching rate; however, energy landscapes obtained from FEA simulations suggest that by tuning the elastic moduli and thicknesses of the constituent polymer layers, microparticles of the size shown here may be fabricated to actuate on timescales as fast as 1 μs.

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