Related papers: Entropic rigidity of a crumpling network in a rand…
A flexible sheet in uniform parallel flow is studied in order to quantify its fluid dynamic drag and fluid-elastic stability characteristics. An experimental campaign is undertaken that involves a cantilevered sheet in air flow…
Simulations are used to examine the microscopic origins of strain hardening in polymer glasses. While traditional entropic network models can be fit to the total stress, their underlying assumptions are inconsistent with simulation results.…
Taking into account the nonequivalence of fixed-force and fixed-length ensembles in the weak-force regime, equations of state are derived that describe the equilibrium extension or compression of an ideal Gaussian polymer chain in response…
A new method is used to measure the stress and elastic constants of purely entropic phantom networks, in which a fraction $p$ of neighbors are tethered by inextensible bonds. We find that close to the percolation threshold $p_c$ the shear…
The mechanical properties of thermally excited two-dimensional crystalline membranes can depend dramatically on their geometry and topology. A particularly relevant example is the effect on the crumpling transition of holes in the membrane.…
Soft elastic sheets resting on rigid surfaces develop wrinkles, rucks, and folds due to the combined influence of elasticity, gravity, and contact interactions. Despite their ubiquity, the principles governing their morphology and…
Soft composite solids are made of inclusions dispersed within soft matrices. They are ubiquitous in nature and form the basis of many biological tissues. In the field of materials science, synthetic soft composites are promising candidates…
We study the statistical mechanics of a closed random manifold of fixed area and fluctuating volume, encapsulating a fixed number of noninteracting particles. Scaling analysis yields a unified description of such swollen manifolds,…
We study the entropic force due to a fluctuating semiflexible polymer that is grafted from one end and confined by a rigid and rough wall from the other end. We show how roughness of the wall modifies the entropic force. In addition to the…
The paper is concerned with dynamics of multi-phase media consisting of a solid permeable material and a compressible Newtonian fluid. Governing macroscopic equations are derived starting from the space-averaged microscopic mass and…
We investigate the weakening of elastic materials through randomly distributed circles and cracks numerically and compare the results to predictions from homogenization theories. We find a good agreement for the case of randomly oriented…
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…
We study the problem of folding of the regular triangular lattice in the presence of a quenched random bending rigidity + or - K and a magnetic field h (conjugate to the local normal vectors to the triangles). The randomness in the bending…
The rigidity of a network of elastic beams crucially depends on the specific details of its structure. We show both numerically and theoretically that there is a class of isotropic networks which are stiffer than any other isotropic network…
Photoelasticity is employed to investigate the stress state near stiff rectangular and rhombohedral inclusions embedded in a 'soft' elastic plate. Results show that the singular stress field predicted by the linear elastic solution for the…
In this work, we present a method for simulating the large-scale deformation and crumpling of thin, elastoplastic sheets. Motivated by the physical behavior of thin sheets during crumpling, two different formulations of the governing…
Random packings of granular chains are presented as a model polymer system to investigate the contribution of entanglements to strain-stiffening in the absence of Brownian motion. The chain packings are sheared in triaxial compression…
An energy-minimal simulation is proposed to study the patterns and mechanical properties of elastically crumpled wires in two dimensions. We varied the bending rigidity and stretching modulus to measure the energy allocation, size-mass…
Using a minimal model of cells or cohesive cell layers as continuum active elastic media, we examine the effect of substrate thickness and stiffness on traction forces exerted by strongly adhering cells. We obtain a simple expression for…
We experimentally and numerically examine stress-dependent electrical transport in granular materials to elucidate the origins of their universal dielectric response. The ac responses of granular systems under varied compressive loadings…