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Recent progress in nanotechnology enables us to utilize the elastic strain engineering, the emerging technology capable of controlling the physio-chemical properties of materials via externally-imposed elastic strains, for hard materials.…
Cracks, the major vehicle for material failure, tend to accelerate to high velocities in brittle materials. In three-dimensions, cracks generically undergo a micro-branching instability at about 40% of their sonic limiting velocity. Recent…
We present an adaptive space-time phase field formulation for dynamic fracture of brittle shells. Their deformation is characterized by the Kirchhoff-Love thin shell theory using a curvilinear surface description. All kinematical objects…
We investigate the shear elastic modulus of soft polymer foams loaded with hard spherical particles and we show that, for constant bubble size and gas volume fraction, strengthening is strongly dependent on the size of those inclusions.…
We investigate the sliding strength of thin filaments in frictional contact with a translating cylinder, perpendicular to the filaments' axes, in knotted (clove hitch) and unknotted (capstan) configurations. Recent work reported superlinear…
It is shown that preferential concentrations of inertial (finite-size) particle suspensions in turbulent flows follow from the dissipative nature of their dynamics. In phase space, particle trajectories converge toward a dynamical fractal…
Through experiments, we idealise a plant leaf as a flexible, thin, rectangular plate clamped at the midpoint and positioned perpendicular to an airflow. Flexibility of the structure is considered as an advantage at moderate flow speed…
The rise of soft materials and additive manufacturing has provided the feasibility of developing elastomer lattices for various engineering applications. Although earlier attempts have been made to manufacture and test the elastomer…
We introduce a lattice model able to describe damage and yielding in heterogeneous materials ranging from brittle to ductile ones. Ductile fracture surfaces, obtained when the system breaks once the strain is completely localized, are shown…
Icosahedral shells undergo a buckling transition as the ratio of Young's modulus to bending stiffness increases. Strong bending stiffness favors smooth, nearly spherical shapes, while weak bending stiffness leads to a sharply faceted…
We report results on the interrelation between driving force, roughness exponent, branching and crack speed in a finite element model. We show that for low applied loadings the crack speed reaches the values measured in the experiments, and…
We propose a mathematical model to describe the athermal fluctuations of thin sheets driven by the type of random driving that might be experienced prior to weak crumpling. The model is obtained by merging the F\"oppl-von K\'arm\'an…
Compressive-shear fracture is commonly observed in rock-like materials. However, this fracture type cannot be captured by current phase field models (PFMs), which have been proven an effective tool for modeling fracture initiation,…
Widespread processes in nature and technology are governed by the dynamical transition whereby a material in an initially solid-like state then yields plastically. Major unresolved questions concern whether any material will yield smoothly…
Chiral rodlike colloids exposed to strong depletion attraction may self-assemble into chiral membranes whose twisted director field differs from that of a 3D bulk chiral nematic. We formulate a simple microscopic variational theory to…
The structural stability of a lightsail under the laser flux necessary for interstellar flight is studied analytically and numerically. A sinusoidal perturbation is introduced into a two-dimensional thin-film sail to determine if the sail…
We investigate compressive failure of heterogeneous materials on the basis of a continuous progressive damage model. The model explicitely accounts for tensile and shear local damage and reproduces the main features of compressive failure…
We study the existence of distinct failure regimes in a model for fracture in fibrous materials. We simulate a bundle of parallel fibers under uniaxial static load and observe two different failure regimes: a catastrophic and a slowly…
Recent experiments have imposed controlled swelling patterns on thin polymer films, which subsequently buckle into three-dimensional shapes. We develop a solution to the design problem suggested by such systems, namely, if and how one can…
We test the standard model for the length contraction of a bundle of strings under twist, and find deviation that is significantly greater than typically appreciated and that has a different nature at medium and large twist angles. By…