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Helical ribbons arise in many biological and engineered systems, often driven by anisotropic surface stress, residual strain, and geometric or elastic mismatch between layers of a laminated composite. A full mathematical analysis is…
Helical objects are often implemented in electronic or mechanical micro-systems, requiring a precise understanding of their mechanical properties. While helices formed by cylindrical filaments have been intensely investigated, little is…
We study the spontaneous out-of-plane bending of a planar untwisted ribbon composed of nematic polymer networks activated by a change in temperature. Our theory accounts for both stretching and bending energies, which compete to establish…
We study two cross-linked polymer systems in the strong stretching regime. The first consists of two polymers sharing one endpoint, with the other two endpoints coupled by a harmonic potential. Within the weakly bending approximation, we…
A theoretical analysis of the effect of force and torque on spontaneously twisted, fluctuating elastic ribbons is presented. We find that when a filament with a straight center line and a spontaneously twisted noncircular cross section is…
We use numerical simulations to show how a fully flexible filament binding to a deformable cylindrical surface may acquire a macroscopic persistence length and a helical conformation. This is a result of the nontrivial elastic response to…
We present a solution for the Green's function for the general case of a helical wormlike chain with twist-bend coupling, and demonstrate the applicability of our solution for evaluating general structural and mechanical chain properties.…
We investigate theoretically the effect of polymer tension on the collective behavior of reversibly binding cross-links. For this purpose, we employ a model of two weakly bending wormlike chains aligned in parallel by a tensile force, with…
The conformational and electronic properties of conducting flexible random and self-avoiding walk polymer chains are under investigation. A Hamiltonian for conjugated flexible polymers is introduced and its physical consequences are…
The statistical mechanics of a ribbon polymer made up of two semiflexible chains is studied using both analytical techniques and simulation. The system is found to have a crossover transition at some finite temperature, from a type of short…
Constitutive equations are derived for the time-dependent behavior of particle-reinforced elastomers at isothermal loading with finite strains. A rubbery polymer is modelled as a network of macromolecules bridged by junctions which can slip…
The equilibrium partitioning of linear polymer chains into flexible polymer networks is governed by intricate entropic constraints arising from configurational degrees of freedom of both chains and network, yet a quantitative understanding…
Statistical mechanics is an important tool for understanding polymer electroelasticity because the elasticity of polymers is primarily due to entropy. However, a common approach for the statistical mechanics of polymer chains, the Gaussian…
Twist stiffness and an asymmetric bending stiffness of a polymer or a polymer bundle is captured by the elastic ribbon model. We investigate the effects a ring geometry induces to a thermally fluctuating ribbon, finding bend-bend coupling…
Ribbons are a class of slender structures whose length, width, and thickness are widely separated from each other. This scale separation gives a ribbon unusual mechanical properties in athermal macroscopic settings, e.g. it can bend without…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, we provide chain-level insights into the dissimilarities in rearrangements of polymers under uniaxial tensile and compressive deformation in glassy and semicrystalline samples of varying chain lengths.…
Predicting the macroscopic mechanical behavior of polymeric materials from the micro-structural features has remained a challenge for decades. Existing theoretical models often fail to accurately capture the experimental data, due to…
We study a minimal extension of the worm-like chain to describe polypeptides having alpha-helical secondary structure. In this model presence/absence of secondary structure enters as a scalar variable that controls the local chain bending…
Helices are not generic outcomes of polymer collapse. Collapsed conformations of semiflexible polymers with isotropic attractions typically form globules, toroids, or rod-like structures, as seen in simulations and described by…
We present a general theory for the equilibrium structure of cylindrical tubules and helical ribbons of chiral lipid membranes. This theory is based on a continuum elastic free energy that permits variations in the direction of molecular…