Related papers: Length-Controlled Elasticity in 3D Fiber Networks
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…
The elasticity of disordered and polydisperse polymer networks is a fundamental problem of soft matter physics that is still open. Here, we self-assemble polymer networks via simulations of a mixture of bivalent and tri- or tetravalent…
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…
Elastic effects in a model of disordered nematic elastomers are numerically investigated in two dimensions. Networks crosslinked in the isotropic phase exhibit unusual soft mechanical response against stretching. It arises from gradual…
Cells actively probe and respond to the stiffness of their surroundings. Since mechanosensory cells in connective tissue are surrounded by a disordered network of biopolymers, their in vivo mechanical environment can be extremely…
Disordered spring networks are a useful paradigm to examine macroscopic mechanical properties of amorphous materials. Here, we study the elastic behavior of under-constrained spring networks, i.e.\ networks with more degrees of freedom than…
Shape-morphing networks of mesoscale filaments are a common hierarchical feature in biology and hold significant potential for a range of technological applications, from micro-muscles to shape-morphing optical devices. Here, we demonstrate…
Recent experiments have demonstrated that the nonlinear elasticity of in vitro networks of the biopolymer actin is dramatically altered in the presence of a flexible cross-linker such as the abundant cytoskeletal protein filamin. The basic…
We study the mechanical stiffening behavior in two-dimensional (2D) cross-linked networks of semiflexible biopolymer filaments under simple shear. Filamental constituents immersed in a fluid undergo thermally excited bending motions.…
Analyzing nonlinear conformational relaxation dynamics in elastic networks corresponding to two classical motor proteins, we find that they respond by well-defined internal mechanical motions to various initial deformations and that these…
We study the elasticity of random fiber networks. Starting from a microscopic picture of the non-affine deformation fields we calculate the macroscopic elastic moduli both in a scaling theory and a self-consistent effective medium theory.…
We develop a continuum theory for equilibrium elasticity of a network of crosslinked semiflexible filaments, spanning the full range between flexible entropy-driven chains to stiff athermal rods. We choose the 3-chain constitutive model…
The two approaches to analyzing the large strain behavior of rubbery networks are phenomenologically, using strain energy functions drawn from continuum mechanics, and molecular models, which apply statistical mechanics to compute the…
We investigate by exact optimization methods the roughening of two and three-dimensional systems of elastic lines with point disorder and hard-core repulsion with open boundary conditions. In 2d we find logarithmic behavior whereas in 3d…
We investigate by exact optimization method properties of two- and three-dimensional systems of elastic lines in presence of splayed columnar disorder. The ground state of many lines is separable both in 2d and 3d leading to a random walk…
We consider both leaderless and leader-follower, possibly nonlinear, networks affected by time-varying communication delays. For such systems, we give a set of sufficient conditions that guarantee the convergence of the network towards some…
Disordered fiber networks are ubiquitous in a broad range of natural (e.g., cytoskeleton) and manmade (e.g., aerogels) materials. In this paper, we discuss the emergence of topological floppy edge modes in these fiber networks as a result…
We investigate wrinkling of two-dimensional random and triangular semiflexible polymer networks under shear. Both types of semiflexible networks exhibit wrinkling above a small critical shear angle, which scales with an exponent of the…
Isostatic networks are minimally rigid and therefore have, generically, nonzero elastic moduli. Regular isostatic networks have finite moduli in the limit of large sizes. However, numerical simulations show that all elastic moduli of…
The elastic behavior of materials operating in the linear regime is constrained, by definition, to operations that are linear in the imposed deformation. Though the nonlinear regime holds promise for new functionality, the design in this…