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An addition of polymers can significantly reduce drag in wall-bounded turbulent flows, such as pipes or channels. This phenomenon is accompanied by a noticeable modification of the mean velocity profile. Starting from the premise that…
The folding transition of biopolymers from the coil to compact structures has attracted wide research interest in the past and is well studied in polymer physics. Recent seminal works on DNA in confined devices have shown that these long…
Compression of an adsorbed polymer layer distorts its relaxed structure. Surface force measurements from different laboratories show that the return to this relaxed structure after the compression is released can be slowed to the scale of…
The competing effect of a periodic pinning potential and random point disorder is studied for arrays of elastic lines or directed polymers. The groundstates are investigated by exact combinatorial optimization. In both two and three…
Mechanical metamaterials are usually designed to show desired responses to prescribed forces. In some applications, the desired force-response relationship might be hard to specify exactly, although examples of forces and corresponding…
Wrinkling is the phenomenon of out-of-plane deformation patterns in thin walled structures, as a result of a local compressive (internal) loads in combination with a large membrane stiffness and a small but non-zero bending stiffness.…
We report simulation results on melts of entangled linear polymers confined in a free-standing thin film. We study how the geometric constraints imposed by the confinement alter the entanglement state of the system compared to the…
Topological entanglements in polymers are mimicked by sliding rings (slip-links) which enforce pair contacts between monomers. We study the force-extension curve for linear polymers in which slip-links create additional loops of variable…
The mechanical properties of a polymeric network containing both crosslinks and sliplinks (entanglements) are studied using a multi-chain Brownian dynamics simulation. We coarse-grain at the level of chain segments connecting consecutive…
In this paper, we consider directed polymers in random environment with discrete space and time. For transverse dimension at least equal to 3, we prove that diffusivity holds for the path in the full weak disorder region, i.e., where the…
Starting from three-dimensional nonlinear elasticity under the restriction of incompressibility, we derive reduced models to capture the behavior of strings in response to external forces. Our $\Gamma$-convergence analysis of the…
A polymer network fractures by breaking covalent bonds, but the experimentally measured strength of the polymer network is orders of magnitude lower than the strength of covalent bonds. We investigate the effect of statistical variation of…
We explore the effect of random permanent cross-links on a system of directed polymers confined between two planes with their end-points free to slide on them. We treat the cross-links as quenched disorder and we use a semimicroscopic…
We investigate the effects of topological constraints (entanglements) on two dimensional polymer loops in the dense phase, and at the collapse transition (Theta point). Previous studies have shown that in the dilute phase the entangled…
Entangled polymers are an important class of materials for their toughness, processability, and functionalizability. However, physically detailed modeling of highly entangled polymers can prove challenging, especially as one considers…
When an elastic object is dragged through a viscous fluid tangent to a rigid boundary, it experiences a lift force perpendicular to its direction of motion. An analogous lift mechanism occurs when a rigid symmetric object translates…
Unlike hard materials such as metals and ceramics, rubbery materials can endure large deformations due to the large conformational degree of freedom of the crosslinked three-dimensional polymer network. However, the effect of the branching…
Using results from Schramm Loewner evolution (SLE), we give the expression of the fluctuation-induced force exerted by a polymer on a small impenetrable disk, in various 2-dimensional domain geometries. We generalize to two polymers and…
We propose a simple friction model for isolated polymer chains on a solid substrate. The chains are pulled at constant velocity by one end, the other end can be trapped on the solid substrate on localised sites. We focus on the energy…
Filamentous bio-materials such as fibrin or collagen networks exhibit an enormous stiffening of their elastic moduli upon large deformations. This pronounced nonlinear behavior stems from a significant separation between the stiffnesses…