Related papers: Nonlinear effective medium theory of disordered sp…

Jammed packings of repulsive elastic spheres have emerged as a rich model system within which elastic properties of disordered glassy materials may be elucidated. Most of the work on these packings have focused on the case of vanishing…

Semiflexible polymers such as filamentous actin play a vital role in the mechanical behavior of cells, yet the basic properties of cross-linked F-actin networks remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we have performed numerical…

The elastic moduli of four numerical random isotropic packings of Hertzian spheres are studied. The four samples are assembled with different preparation procedures, two of which aim to reproduce experimental compaction by vibration and…

We propose a neural network framework to preclude the need to define or observe incompletely or inaccurately defined states of a material in order to describe its response. The neural network design is based on the classical Coleman-Gurtin…

Unlike most synthetic materials, biological materials often stiffen as they are deformed. This nonlinear elastic response, critical for the physiological function of some tissues, has been documented since at least the 19th century, but the…

The rigidity of a network of elastic beams crucially depends on the specific details of its structure. We show both numerically and theoretically that there is a class of isotropic networks which are stiffer than any other isotropic network…

The mechanics of disordered fibrous networks such as those that make up the extracellular matrix are strongly dependent on the local connectivity or coordination number. For biopolymer networks this coordination number is typically between…

Disordered elastic networks provide a framework for describing a wide variety of physical systems, ranging from amorphous solids, through polymeric fibrous materials to confluent cell tissues. In many cases, such networks feature two widely…

The stress-strain relationship of biological soft tissues affected by Marfan's syndrome is believed to be non-convex. More specifically, Haughton and Merodio recently proposed a strain-energy density leading to localized strain softening,…

Strain energy density is calculated for a network of flexible chains with weak excluded-volume interactions (whose energy is small compared with thermal energy). Constitutive equations are developed for an incompressible network of chains…

The stochastic variations in the structural properties of thin fiber networks govern to a great extent their mechanical performance. To assess the influence of local structural variability on the local strain and mechanical response of the…

Unlike in crystals, it is difficult to trace emergent material properties of amorphous solids to their underlying structure. Nevertheless, one can tune features of a disordered spring network, ranging from bulk elastic constants to specific…

The paper investigates localized deformation patterns resulting from the onset of instabilities in lattice structures. The study is motivated by previous observations on discrete hexagonal lattices, where the onset of non-uniform,…

Recent advances in designing meta-materials have demonstrated that global mechanical properties of disordered spring networks can be tuned by selectively modifying only a small subset of bonds. Here, using a computationally-efficient…

We investigate the interplay between pre-stress and mechanical properties in random elastic networks. To do this in a controlled fashion, we introduce an algorithm for creating random freestanding frames that support exactly one state of…

Linear regression on network-linked observations has been an essential tool in modeling the relationship between response and covariates with additional network structures. Previous methods either lack inference tools or rely on restrictive…

The production of mechanical stresses in living organisms largely relies on localized, force-generating active units embedded in filamentous matrices. Numerical simulations of discrete fiber networks with fixed boundaries have shown that…

The layering approach used in fused filament fabrication (FFF) enables creation of complex designs generated by topology optimization. Defects associated with the layer-by-layer process, introduce considerable random variability to the…

We use optical tweezers microrheology and fluorescence microscopy to apply nonlinear microscale strains to entangled and crosslinked actin networks, and measure the resulting stress and actin filament deformations. We couple nonlinear…

Disordered networks of semiflexible filaments are common support structures in biology. Familiar examples include fibrous matrices in blood clots, bacterial biofilms, and essential components of cells and tissues of plants, animals, and…