Related papers: Unfolding the Sulcus
We develop a theoretical description of the topological disentanglement occurring when torus knots reach the ends of a semi-flexible polymer under tension. These include decays into simpler knots and total unknotting. The minimal number of…
The bifurcation of an incompressible neo-Hookean thick block with a ratio of thickness to length {eta}, subject to pure bending, is considered. The two incremental equilibrium equations corresponding to a nonlinear pre-buckling state of…
We explore the malleability of ultra-small metal nanoparticles by means of ab initio calculations. It is revealed that, when strained, such nanoparticles exhibit complex behavior, including bifurcation between slow and fast quakes of their…
This paper addresses testing of compressed structures, such as shells, that exhibit catastrophic buckling and notorious imperfection sensitivity. The central concept is the probing of a loaded structural specimen by a controlled lateral…
Previous linear bifurcation analyses have evidenced that an axially stretched soft cylindrical tube may develop an infinite-wavelength (localised) instability when one or both of its lateral surfaces are under sufficient surface tension.…
Lubricated sliding contact between soft solids is an interesting topic in biomechanics and for the design of small-scale engineering devices. As a model of this mechanical set-up, two elastic nonlinear solids are considered jointed through…
Nucleation phenomena commonly observed in our every day life are of fundamental, technological and societal importance in many areas, but some of their most intimate mechanisms remain however to be unravelled. Crystal nucleation, the early…
Wrinkling of an inextensible elastic lining of an inner-lined tube under imposed pressure is considered. A simple equation modeling the elastic properties of the lining, the pressure, and the soft-substrate forces is derived. This equation…
A laterally confined thin elastic sheet lying on a liquid substrate displays regular undulations, called wrinkles, characterized by a spatially extended energy distribution and a well-defined wavelength $\lambda$. As the confinement…
Cavitation and sulcification of soft elastomers are two examples of thresholdless, nonlinear instabilities that evade detection by linearization. I show that the onset of such instabilities can be understood as a kind of phase coexistence…
When a thin elastic sheet crumples, the elastic energy condenses into a network of folding lines and point vertices. These folds and vertices have elastic energy densities much greater than the surrounding areas, and most of the work…
Colloidal particles are often seen as big atoms that can be directly observed in real space. They are therefore playing an increasingly important role as model systems to study processes of interest in condensed matter physics such as…
From cell development to space rockets, the mechanical stability of thin shells is crucial across many industrial and natural processes. However, predicting shells' failure properties remains an open challenge, owing to their sensitivity to…
We address the folding induced by differential growth in soft layered solids via an elementary model that consists of a soft growing neo-Hookean elastic layer adhered to a deep elastic substrate. As the layer/substrate modulus ratio is…
A thin flat rectangular plate supported on its edges and subjected to in-plane loading exhibits stable post-buckling behaviour. However, the introduction of a nonlinear (softening) elastic foundation may cause the response to become…
Slender elastic objects such as a column tend to buckle under loads. While static buckling is well understood as a bifurcation problem, the evolution of shapes during dynamic buckling is much harder to study. Elastic rings under normal…
A scroll wave in a sufficiently thin layer of an excitable medium with negative filament tension can be stable nevertheless due to filament rigidity. Above a certain critical thickness of the medium, such scroll wave will have a tendency to…
In this paper we study unfoldings of saddle-nodes and their Dulac time. By unfolding a saddle-node, saddles and nodes appear. In the first result (Theorem A) we prove uniform regularity by which orbits and their derivatives arrive at a…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft phase-changing solids that exhibit large reversible contractions upon heating, Goldstone-like soft modes and resultant microstructural instabilities. We heat a planar LCE slab to isotropic, clamp…
The buckling of a soft elastic sample under growth or swelling has highlighted a new interest in materials science, morphogenesis, and biology or physiology. Indeed, the change of mass or volume is a common fact of any living species, and…