Related papers: Structural Signature of a Brittle-to-Ductile Trans…
In ordinary solids, material disorder is known to increase the size of the process zone in which stress concentrates at the crack tip, causing a transition from localized to diffuse failure. Here, we report experiments on disordered 2D…
We survey the linear viscoelasticity of a new type of transient network: bridged wormlike micelles, whose structure has been characterized recently [Ramos and Ligoure, (2007)]. This composite material is obtained by adding telechelic…
Recent computational and laboratory experiments have shown that the brittle-ductile transitions in metallic glasses such as Vitreloy1 are strongly sensitive to the initial effective disorder (or "fictive") temperature. Glasses with lower…
Dispersed colloidal particles within a suspension can aggregate and spontaneously self-organize into a robust, percolating structure known as a gel. These network-like structures are prevalent in nature and play a critical role in many…
Viscoelastic and thermodynamic properties of transient gels comprised of telechelic polymers are theoretically studied. We extend classical theories of transient networks so that correlations among polymer chains through the network…
We investigated the viscoelastic properties of colloid-polymer mixtures at intermediate colloid volume fraction and varying polymer concentrations, thereby tuning the attractive interactions. Within the examined range of polymer…
We study two closely related, nonlinear models of a viscoplastic solid. These models capture essential features of plasticity over a wide range of strain rates and applied stresses. They exhibit inelastic strain relaxation and steady flow…
Significant progress has been made in recent years in understanding the dynamics of pure hydrogen-bonded systems by analyzing the spectral shape of various susceptibilities. Monohydroxy- and polyalcohols are currently considered to form…
We study the yielding transition in soft jammed materials under oscillatory shear, employing a novel methodology that combines rheological measurements with detailed dynamical observations. This method provides a comprehensive view of the…
Complex fluids such as emulsions, colloidal gels, polymer or surfactant solutions are all characterized by the existence of a "microstructure" which may couple to an external flow on timescales that are easily probed in experiments. Such a…
The mechanical properties of tissues play an essential role for all tissue properties such as cell division, and differentiation or morphogenesis. Here, we study theoretically the rheology of 2-dimensional epithelial tissues described by a…
Many wormlike micellar systems exhibit appreciable shear thinning due to shear induced alignment. As the micelles get aligned introducing directionality in the system, the viscoelastic properties are no longer expected to be isotropic. An…
Wormlike micellar solutions formed by long-chained zwitterionic surfactants show gel-like rheology at room temperature and have recently been found to exhibit other complex and interesting rheological features. We study the dynamics of…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
Brittle materials exhibit sharp dynamical fractures when meeting Griffith's criterion, whereas ductile materials blunt a sharp crack by plastic responses. Upon continuous pulling ductile materials exhibit a necking instability which is…
Non-Newtonian rheology is widely acknowledged in subsurface fluids, yet its presence and effects are largely ignored in current fracture-flow studies. Here, we simulate fracture flow of non-Newtonian polymer solutions on a several…
We have investigated the rheology and structure of a gel formed from a mixture of non-Brownian particles and two immiscible liquids. The suspension of particles in a liquid undergoes gelation upon the addition of a small content of second,…
Many biological tissues feature a heterogeneous network of fibers whose tensile and bending rigidity contribute substantially to these tissues' elastic properties. Rigidity percolation has emerged as a important paradigm for relating these…
In chemically reactive environments, the mechanical integrity of geomaterials is fundamentally compromised by solid matrix dissolution. In this study, we propose a fully coupled chemo-mechanical phase-field framework to capture the dynamic…
The morphological dynamics, instabilities and transitions of elastic filaments in viscous flows underlie a wealth of biophysical processes from flagellar propulsion to intracellular streaming, and are also key to deciphering the rheological…