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Spider silks are remarkable materials characterized by superb mechanical properties such as strength, extensibility and lightweightedness. Yet, to date, limited models are available to fully explore sequence-property relationships for…
Superlubricity is a frictionless tribological state sometimes occurring in nanoscale material junctions. It is often associated with incommensurate surface lattice structures appearing at the interface. Here, by using the recently…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…
Hygro-responsive materials exhibit a complex structure-to-property relationship. The interactions of water within these materials under varying hygric and mechanical loads play a crucial role in their macroscopic deformation and final…
A mechanistic understanding of adhesion in soft materials is critical in the fields of transportation (tires, gaskets, seals), biomaterials, micro-contact printing, and soft robotics. Measurements have long demonstrated that the apparent…
Surface roughness is a key factor when it comes to friction and wear, as well as to other physical properties. These phenomena are controlled by mechanisms acting at small scales, in which the topography of apparently-flat surfaces is…
Planar sliding of objects is modeled and analyzed. The model can be used for non-prehensile manipulation of objects lying on a surface. We study possible motions generated by frictional contacts, such as those arising between a soft finger…
\textbf{Background} Hydrogels are crosslinked polymer networks that can absorb and retain a large fraction of liquid. Near a critical sliding velocity, hydrogels pressed against smooth surfaces exhibit time-dependent frictional behavior…
We report a surprising hysteretic behavior in the dynamics of a simple one-dimensional nonlinear model inspired by the tribological problem of two sliding surfaces with a thin solid lubricant layer in between. In particular, we consider the…
Modeling arbitrarily large deformations of surfaces smoothly embedded in three-dimensional space is challenging. The difficulties come from two aspects: the existing geometry processing or forward simulation methods penalize the difference…
Rapid advances in additive manufacturing over the past decade have kindled widespread interest in the rational design of metamaterials with unique properties. However, many applications require multi-physics metamaterials, where multiple…
Superhydrophobic surfaces demonstrate promising potential for skin friction reduction in naval and hydrodynamic applications. Recent developments of superhydrophobic surfaces aiming for scalable applications use random distribution of…
Developable surfaces are commonly observed in various applications such as architecture, product design, manufacturing, mechanical materials, and data physicalization as well as in the development of tangible interaction and deformable…
We analyze plane strain cold rolling processes, at large strains but slow strain rates, by finite element modeling. At low temperatures, slow strain rates, and moderate thickness reductions during rolling (at which Bauschinger effect can be…
Soft slender structures are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems and can be observed at scales that range from the nanometric to the kilometric, from polymers to space tethers. We present a practical numerical approach to simulate…
Prion and prion-like molecules are a type of self replicating aggregate protein that have been implicated in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. Over recent decades the molecular dynamics of prions have been characterized both…
We show that porcine brain matter can be modelled accurately as a very soft rubber-like material using the Mooney-Rivlin strain energy function, up to strains as high as 60\%. This result followed from simple shear experiments performed on…
Prediction capability is considered an important issue in response surface methodology. Following the line of argument that a design should have several desirable properties we have extended an existing compound design criterion to include…
Programming the static friction of mechanical interfaces is critical for soft robotics, haptics, and precision gripping. Static friction is governed by the real contact area, and standard rough surfaces exhibit a linear area-load scaling…
We propose a model for the mechanical behavior of protein materials. Based on a limited number of experimental macromolecular parameters (persistence and contour lengths, rate of unfolding dissipation) we obtain the macroscopic behavior of…