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Albuminuria occurs when albumin leaks abnormally into the urine. Its mechanism remains unclear. A gel-compression hypothesis attributes the glomerular barrier to compression of the glomerular basement membrane (GBM) as a gel layer. Loss of podocyte foot processes would allow the gel layer to expand circumferentially, enlarge its pores and leak albumin into the urine. To test this hypothesis, we develop a poroelastic model of the GBM. It predicts GBM compression in healthy glomerulus and GBM expansion in the diseased state, essentially confirming the hypothesis. However, by itself, the gel compression and expansion mechanism fails to account for two features of albuminuria: the reduction in filtration flux and the thickening of the GBM. A second mechanism, the constriction of flow area at the slit diaphragm downstream of the GBM, must be included. The cooperation between the two mechanisms produces the amount of increase in GBM porosity expected in vivo in a mutant mouse model, and also captures the two in vivo features of reduced filtration flux and increased GBM thickness. Finally, the model supports the idea that in the healthy glomerulus, gel compression may help maintain a roughly constant filtration flux under varying filtration pressure. 

In the phase-field description of moving contact line problems, the two-phase system can be described by free energies, and the constitutive relations can be derived based on the assumption of energy dissipation. In this work we propose a novel boundary condition for contact angle hysteresis by exploring wall energy relaxation, which allows the system to be in non-equilibrium at the contact line. Our method captures pinning, advancing and receding automatically without the explicit knowledge of contact line velocity and contact angle. The microscopic dynamic contact angle is computed as part of the solution instead of being imposed. Furthermore, the formulation satisfies a dissipative energy law, where the dissipation terms all have their physical origin. Based on the energy law, we develop an implicit finite element method that is second order in time. The numerical scheme is proven to be unconditionally energy stable for matched density and zero contact angle hysteresis, and is numerically verified to be energy dissipative for a broader range of parameters. We benchmark our method by computing pinned drops and moving interfaces in the plane Poiseuille flow. When the contact line moves, its dynamics agrees with the Cox theory. In the test case of oscillating drops, the contact line transitions smoothly between pinning, advancing and receding. Our method can be directly applied to three-dimensional problems as demonstrated by the test case of sliding drops on an inclined wall.