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Refrigerated truck trailers are currently mainly operated with environmentally harmful diesel units; an alternative is to operate the refrigeration unit with electrical energy. However, this requires a battery, the size of which can be…

The dry frictional contact between two solid surfaces is well-known to obey Coulomb friction laws. In particular, the static friction force resisting the relative lateral (tangential) motion of solid surfaces, initially at rest, is known to…

Management of discarded tires is a compelling environmental issue worldwide. Although several approaches have been developed to recycle waste tire rubbers, their application in solid-state cooling is still unexplored. Considering the high…

Loss of braking power and rubber skidding on a wet road is still an open physics problem, since neither the hydrodynamical effects nor the loss of surface adhesion that are sometimes blamed really manage to explain the 20-30% observed loss…

We evaluate the loss of stability of axially compressed slender and thick-walled tubes subject to a residual stress distribution. The nonlinear theory of elasticity, when used to analyze the underlying deformation, shows that the residual…

We show that transport in the presence of entropic barriers exhibits peculiar characteristics which makes it distinctly different from that occurring through energy barriers. The constrained dynamics yields a scaling regime for the particle…

Rubber friction is of major practical importance in applications such as tires, rubber seals, and footwear. This review article focuses on the theory and experimental studies of rubber friction on substrates with random roughness. We…

Expositions of the Euler equations for the rotation of a rigid body often invoke the idea of a specially damped system whose energy dissipates while its angular momentum magnitude is conserved in the body frame. An attempt to explicitly…

Rubber friction on wet rough substrates at low velocities is typically 20-30% smaller than for the corresponding dry surfaces. We show that this cannot be due to hydrodynamics and propose a novel explanation based on a sealing effect…

We investigate how cyclic loading evolves the structure and deformation behaviors of a granular raft composed of particles floating at an air-oil interface. The raft has a disordered particle packing structure, and is cohesive due to…

The design of a power buffer to mitigate the negative impact of constant power loads on voltage stability as well as enhancing ride-through capability for the loads during upstream voltage disturbances is examined. The power buffer adjusts…

Constitutive equations are derived for the viscoelastic response of rubbery polymers at finite strains. A polymer is thought of as a network of long chains connected to temporary junctions. At a random time, a chain detaches from a…

The mechanical response of rubbers has been ubiquitously assumed to be only a function of the imposed strain. Using innovative X-ray measurements capturing the three-dimensional spatial volumetric strain fields, we demonstrate that rubbers…

Two equal and opposite distributed dead loads are applied orthogonally to the axis of an elastic rod in its rectilinear reference configuration, one at the extrados and the other at the intrados, such that the resultant applied force per…

Energy dissipation in sheared dry and wet granulates is considered in the presence of an externally applied confining pressure. Discrete element simulations reveal that for sufficiently small confining pressures, the energy dissipation is…

The deformation of a loaded bike tire has been analyzed with a model consisting of a toroid of thin inextensible walls mounted on a central rim. If the tire radius is much shorter than the rim radius, the deflection, d, of the tire can be…

The discovery of configurational forces acting on elastic structures and its initial applications are reviewed. Configurational forces are related to the possibility that an elastic structure can change its configuration, thus inducing a…

Metallic thin-walled round tubes are widely used as energy absorption elements. However, lateral splash of the round tubes under impact loadings reduces the energy absorption efficiency and may cause secondary damages. Therefore, it is…

Amorphous ice has long been invoked as a means for trapping extreme volatiles into solids, explaining the abundances of these species in comets and planetary atmospheres. Experiments have shown that such trapping is possible and have been…

During the last decade, tensegrity systems have been the focus of numerous investigations exploring the possibility of adopting them for planetary landing and exploration applications. Early approaches mainly focused on locomotion aspects…