Related papers: Failure mechanisms in thin electroactive polymer a…
The effective adhesive properties of heterogeneous thin films are characterized through a combined experimental and theoretical investigation. By bridging scales, we show how variations of elastic or adhesive properties at the microscale…
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 show that a smooth giant voltage actuation of soft dielectric plates is not easily obtained in practice. In principle one can exploit, through pre-deformation, the snap-through behavior of their loading curve to deliver a large stretch…
Twisted and coiled polymer actuators (TCPAs) generate large contractile mechanical work mimicking natural muscles, which makes them suitable for robotics and health-assistive devices. Understanding the mechanism of nylon TCPA remains…
A recent paper (Healey et al., J. Nonlin. Sci., 2013, 23:777-805.) predicted the disappearance of the stretch-induced wrinkled pattern of thin, clamped, elastic sheets by numerical simulation of the F\"oppl-von K\'arm\'an equations extended…
Thin elastic sheets supported on compliant media form wrinkles under lateral compression. Since the lateral pressure is coupled to the sheet's deformation, varying it periodically in time creates a parametric excitation. We study the…
We evaluate the effective Hamiltonian governing, at the optically resolved scale, the elastic properties of micro-manipulated membranes. We identify floppy, entropic-tense and stretched-tense regimes, representing different behaviors of the…
Polymer glasses have numerous advantageous mechanical properties in comparison to other materials. One of the most useful is the high degree of toughness that can be achieved due to significant yield occurring in the material. Remarkably,…
Recent experimental observations of anisotropic conductivity in stretched polymer electrolytes films of the polyethylene oxide family are discussed. The main experimental observations, enhancement of the ionic diffusion and conductivity in…
The effective quasistatic conductivity of composite polymeric electrolytes is studied in terms of a hard-core--penetrable-layer model. Used to incorporate the interface phenomena (such as amorphization of the polymer matrix around filler…
We study the dynamics of MEMS microbeams undergoing electrostatic pull-in. At DC voltages close to the pull-in voltage, experiments and numerical simulations have reported `bottleneck' behaviour in which the transient dynamics slow down…
Thin dielectric elastomers with compliant electrodes exhibit various types of instability under the action of electromechanical loading. Guided by the thermodynamically-based formulation of Fosdick and Tang (J. Elasticity 88, 255-297,…
Thin elastic sheets appear in systems ranging from graphene to biological membranes, where phenomena such as wrinkling, folding, and thermal fluctuations originate from geometric nonlinearities. These effects are treated within weakly…
Crumpling of a thin film leads to a unique stiff yet lightweight structure. The stiffness has been attributed to a complex interplay between four basic elements - smooth bends, sharp folds, localized points (developable cones), and…
We study Coulomb drag between the top and bottom surfaces of topological insulator films. We derive a kinetic equation for the thin-film spin density matrix containing the full spin structure of the two-layer system, and analyze the…
Actuating periodically an elastic filament in a viscous liquid generally breaks the constraints of Purcell's scallop theorem, resulting in the generation of a net propulsive force. This observation suggests a method to design simple…
Wrinkling patterns at the metallized surface of thin polymer films are shown to be sensitive to the sticky or slippery character of the polymer/substrate interface (titanium coating, polystyrene film and coated silicon substrate). Selective…
We use molecular simulations to explore how sample dimensions and interfacial properties impact some generic aspects of the mechanical and structural behavior of nanoconfined materials. Specifically, we calculate the strain-dependent…
This work investigates the effects of tangent polar activity on the conformational and dynamic properties of entangled polymer melts through Langevin molecular dynamics simulations. We examine systems composed of all self-propelled,…
A large electric field is typically present in anodic or passive oxide films. Stresses induced by such a large electric field are critical in understanding the breakdown mechanism of thin oxide films and improving their corrosion…