Related papers: Instabilities in elastomers and soft tissues
The stress-strain relationship of biological soft tissues affected by Marfan's syndrome is believed to be non-convex. More specifically, Haughton and Merodio recently proposed a strain-energy density leading to localized strain softening,…
When a block made of an elastomer is subjected to large shear, its surface remains flat. When a block of biological soft tissue is subjected to large shear, it is likely that its surface in the plane of shear will buckle (apparition of…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft phase-changing solids that exhibit large reversible contractions upon heating, Goldstone-like soft modes and resultant microstructural instabilities. We heat a planar LCE slab to isotropic, clamp…
Stability is an important and fruitful avenue of research for liquid crystal elastomers. At constant temperature, upon stretching, the homogeneous state of a nematic body becomes unstable, and alternating shear stripes develop at very low…
The buckling of a soft elastic sample under growth or swelling has highlighted a new interest in materials science, morphogenesis, and biology or physiology. Indeed, the change of mass or volume is a common fact of any living species, and…
Soft materials, such as liquids, polymers, foams, gels, colloids, granular materials, and most soft biological materials, play an important role in our daily lives. From a mechanical viewpoint, soft materials can easily achieve large…
It is shown that a compound elastic structure, which displays a dynamic instability, may be designed as the union (or 'fusion') of two structures which are stable when separately analyzed. The compound elastic structure has two degrees of…
Solid interfaces have intrinsic elasticity. However, in most experiments, this is obscured by bulk stresses. Through microscopic observations of the contact-line geometry of a partially wetting droplet on an anisotropically stretched…
Two classes of non-linear elastic materials are derived via two-dimensional homogenization. These materials are equivalent to a periodic grid of axially-deformable and axially-preloaded structural elements, subject to incremental…
Cavitation and sulcification of soft elastomers are two examples of thresholdless, nonlinear instabilities that evade detection by linearization. I show that the onset of such instabilities can be understood as a kind of phase coexistence…
The classical flexure problem of non-linear incompressible elasticity is revisited for elastic materials whose mechanical response is different in tension and compression---the so-called bimodular materials. The flexure problem is chosen to…
There is a growing interest in producing materials with mechanical behaviours similar to those of internal organs. An artificial tissue may be expected to experience several types of compressive and shear deformation in the course of normal…
Unlike most synthetic materials, biological materials often stiffen as they are deformed. This nonlinear elastic response, critical for the physiological function of some tissues, has been documented since at least the 19th century, but the…
One problem of non-crystalline condensed matter (soft matter) is creating the right equilibrium between elasticity and viscosity, referred to as viscoelasticity. Manifestations of that can be found in everyday live, where the…
We study the elasticity of fibrous materials composed of generalized stiff polymers. It is shown that in contrast to cellular foam-like structures affine strain fields are generically unstable. Instead, a subtle interplay between the…
The choice of elastic energies for thin plates and shells is an unsettled issue with consequences for much recent modeling of soft matter. Through consideration of simple deformations of a thin body in the plane, we demonstrate that four…
Nematic elastomers are a particular class of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) that exhibit both liquid-crystalline order and rubber (entropic) elasticity. This combination makes them stimuli-responsive soft materials with a number of…
Rubber components and soft tissues are often subjected to large bending deformations "in service". The circumferential line elements on the inner face of a bent block can contract up to a certain critical stretch ratio lambda_cr (say)…
The rheological properties of biological tissues are core to processes such as cancer metastasis, wound healing and embryo development. The emergence of tissue and organ structures during morphogenesis requires the precise formation of…
To produce sounds, we adjust the tension of our vocal folds to shape their properties and control the pitch. This efficient mechanism offers inspiration for designing reconfigurable materials and adaptable soft robots. However,…