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Stiff scales adorn the exterior surfaces of fishes, snakes, and many reptiles. They provide protection from external piercing attacks and control over global deformation behavior to aid locomotion, slithering, and swimming across a wide…
Friction is ubiquitous in daily life, from nanoscale machines to large engineering components. By probing the intricate interplay between system parameters and frictional behavior, scientists seek to unveil the underlying mechanisms that…
In this paper we study crawling locomotion based on directional frictional interactions, namely, frictional forces that are sensitive to the sign of the sliding velocity. Surface interactions of this type are common in biology, where they…
This paper presents a comprehensive review of wear mechanisms, with a primary focus on rubber wear under sliding conditions. Beginning with classical wear theories, including the Archard and Rabinowicz models, we analyze their applicability…
A plethora of two-dimensional (2D) materials entered the physics and engineering scene in the last two decades. Their robust, membrane-like sheet permit -- mostly require -- deposition, giving rise to solid-solid dry interfaces whose bodily…
In this paper we tackle the problem of visually predicting surface friction for environments with diverse surfaces, and integrating this knowledge into biped robot locomotion planning. The problem is essential for autonomous robot…
Polyhedral surfaces are fundamental objects in architectural geometry and industrial design. Whereas closeness of a given mesh to a smooth reference surface and its suitability for numerical simulations were already studied extensively, the…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Liquid wetting of a surface is omnipresent in nature and the advance of micro-fabrication and assembly techniques in recent years offers increasing ability to control this phenomenon. Here, we identify how surface roughness influences the…
Microstructural evolution in metallic materials feedbacks with the loading conditions and influences the life time of parts and components. Therefore, the deformation mechanisms have to be fundamentally understood. Tribological loading…
We deduce a microstructure inspired model for humidity and temperature effects on the mechanical response of spider silks, modelled as a composite material with a hard crystalline and a soft amorphous region. Water molecules decrease the…
The dewetting dynamics of ultrathin polymer films, e.g. in the model system of polystyrene on a polydimethylsiloxane-covered substrate, exhibits interesting behavior like a fast decay of the dewetting velocity and a maximum in the width of…
Mechanical metamaterials are structures designed to exhibit an exotic response, such as topological soft modes at a surface. Here we explore single-material 3D prints of these topological structures by translating a ball-and-spring model…
Accurately predicting friction in sliding interfaces that contain third body wear particles is critical for engineering applications such as sliding movement in pistons, bearings, or metal forming. We present a hierarchical multiscale…
Soft polymers are ubiquitous materials in nature and as engineering materials with properties varying from rate-independent to rate-dependent. Current fracture toughness measures are non-unique for rate-dependent soft materials for varying…
The tribological performance of 2D materials makes them good candidates toward a reduction of friction at the macroscale. Superlubricity has been observed for graphene, MoS\textsubscript{2} and MXenes and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is…
Soft and biological matter come in a variety of shapes and geometries. When soft surfaces that do not fit into each other due to a mismatch in Gaussian curvatures form an interface, beautiful geometry-induced patterns emerge. In this paper,…
Biological materials achieve directional reinforcement with oriented assemblies of anisotropic building blocks. One such example is the nanocomposite structure of keratinized epithelium on the toe pad of tree frogs, in which hexagonal…
Drop-surface interaction is predominant in nature as well as in many industrial applications. Freezing rain is the frequent origin of ice accretion on surfaces. Superhydrophobic surfaces show potential for anti-icing applications as they…
The tribology between surfaces can have a profound impact on the response of a mechanical system, such as how granular particles are driven to flow. In this work, we perform experiments that time-resolve the tangential and normal components…