Related papers: Failure mechanisms in thin electroactive polymer a…
I consider the problem of a thin membrane on which a metric has been prescribed, for example by lithographically controlling the local swelling properties of a polymer thin film. While any amount of swelling can be accommodated locally,…
Ionic polymer-metal composites consist in a thin film of electro-active polymers (Nafion R for example) sandwiched between two metallic electrodes. They can be used as sensors or actuators. The polymer is saturated with water, which causes…
In the presence of ATP, molecular motors generate active force dipoles that drive suspensions of protein filaments far from thermodynamic equilibrium, leading to exotic dynamics and pattern formation. Microscopic modelling can help to…
We have developed a theory of polymer entanglement using an extended Cahn-Hilliard functional, with two extra terms. One is a nonlocal attractive term, operating over mesoscales, which is interpreted as giving rise to entanglement, and the…
A thin, elastic sheet floating on the surface of a liquid bath wrinkles when poked at its centre. We study the onset of wrinkling as well as the evolution of the pattern as indentation progresses far beyond the wrinkling threshold. We use…
Ionic electro-active polymers (EAP) are able to deform under the action of an electric field, which confers them many applications as sensor, actuator or energy recovery.An ionic metal-polymer composite (IPMC) consists in an ionic polymer…
Numerical simulations of thin sheets undergoing large deformations are computationally challenging. Depending on the scenario, they may spontaneously buckle, wrinkle, fold, or crumple. Nature's thin tissues often experience significant…
We study the elastic properties of a rigid filament in a bath of self-propelled particles. We find that while fully flexible filaments swell monotonically upon increasing the strength of the propelling force, rigid filaments soften for…
Multifunctional thin films in energy-related devices often must be electrically insulating where a single nanoscale defect can result in complete device-scale failure. Locating and characterizing such defects presents a fundamental problem…
Printing of metallic films has been preferred for roll-to-roll processes over vacuum technologies due to faster processing times and lower processing costs. Films can be produced by depositing inks containing suspended metallic particles…
We present a statistical mechanical study of stiff polymers, motivated by experiments on actin filaments and the considerable current interest in polymer networks. We obtain simple, approximate analytical forms for the force-extension…
A confined incompressible elastic film does not deform uniformly when subjected to adhesive interfacial stresses but with undulations which have a characteristic wavelength scaling linearly with the thickness of the film. In the classical…
Wrinkling, creasing and folding are frequent phenomena encountered in biological and man-made bilayers made by thin films bonded to thicker and softer substrates often containing fibers. Paradigmatic examples of the latter are the skin, the…
This work presents a comprehensive investigation of the elastic and fracture behavior of ply-to-ply angle interlock three-dimensional woven composites. The research investigated novel splitting and wedge-driven out-of-plane fracture tests…
A hydrostatically stressed soft elastic film circumvents the imposed constraint by undergoing a morphological instability, the wavelength of which is dictated by the minimization of the surface and the elastic strain energies of the film.…
We consider a model of an extensible semiflexible filament moving in two dimensions on a motility assay of motor proteins represented explicitly as active harmonic linkers. Their heads bind stochastically to polymer segments within a…
I study numerically the problem of delamination of a thin film elastically attached to a rigid substrate. A nominally flat elastic thin film is modeled using a two-dimensional triangular mesh. Both compression and bending rigidities are…
A thin circular elastic sheet floating on a drop-like liquid substrate is deformed due to incompatibility between the curved substrate and the planar sheet. We adopt a variational viewpoint by minimizing the non-convex membrane energy…
When a thin film moderately adherent to a substrate is subjected to residual stress, the cooperation between fracture and delamination leads to unusual fracture patterns, such as spirals, alleys of crescents and various types of strips, all…
Using Landau-Ginzburg-Devonshire theory, we considered the impact of the flexoelectro-chemical coupling on the size effects inpolar properties and phase transitions of thin ferroelectric films with a layer of elastic defects. We…