Related papers: A Model for Compression-Weakening Materials and th…

Inspired by experiments on the actin driven propulsion of micrometer sized beads we develop and study a minimal mechanical model of a two-dimensional network of stiff elastic filaments grown from the surface of a cylinder. Starting out from…

Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which typically exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical properties. While the linear elasticity of the matrix can significantly impact cell mechanics and functionality, it remains…

Cells sense the geometry and stiffness of their adhesive environment by active contractility. For strong adhesion to flat substrates, two-dimensional contractile network models can be used to understand how force is distributed throughout…

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…

Using a minimal model of cells or cohesive cell layers as continuum active elastic media, we examine the effect of substrate thickness and stiffness on traction forces exerted by strongly adhering cells. We obtain a simple expression for…

Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…

Biological cells embedded in fibrous matrices have been observed to form inter-cellular bands of dense and aligned fibers, through which they mechanically interact over long distances. Such matrix-mediated cellular interactions have been…

Commonly used linear and nonlinear constitutive material models in deformation simulation contain many simplifications and only cover a tiny part of possible material behavior. In this work we propose a framework for learning customized…

Both animal and plant tissue exhibit a nonlinear rheological phenomenon known as compression stiffening, or an increase in moduli with increasing uniaxial compressive strain. Does such a phenomenon exist in single cells, which are the…

Constitutive modeling lies at the core of mechanics, allowing us to map strains onto stresses for a material in a given mechanical setting. Historically, researchers relied on phenomenological modeling where simple mathematical…

During growth, tissue expands and deforms. Given its elastic properties, stresses emerge in an expanding and deforming tissue. Cell rearrangements can dissipate these stresses and numerous experiments confirm the viscoelastic properties of…

We investigate a continuum mechanical model for an adherent cell on two dimensional adhesive micropatterned substrates. The cell is modeled as an isotropic and homogeneous elastic material subject to uniform internal contractile stresses.…

Biopolymer Networks play an important role in coordinating and regulating collective cellular dynamics via a number of signaling pathways. Here, we investigate the mechanical response of a model biopolymer network due to the active…

We investigate the weakening of elastic materials through randomly distributed circles and cracks numerically and compare the results to predictions from homogenization theories. We find a good agreement for the case of randomly oriented…

The present contribution proposes a general constitutive model to simulate the orthotropic stiffness, pre-peak nonlinearity, failure envelopes, and the post-peak softening and fracture of textile composites. Following the microplane model…

Tissues commonly consist of cells embedded within a fibrous biopolymer network. Whereas cell-free reconstituted biopolymer networks typically soften under applied uniaxial compression, various tissues, including liver, brain, and fat, have…

Amorphous elastomers exhibit significant rate-stiffening and unique viscous flow characteristics across a wide range of strain rates, often undergoing glass transition above a strain rate threshold. We have developed a…

We propose and study a neural operator framework for learning memory- and material microstructure-dependent constitutive laws for heterogeneous materials. We work in the two-scale setting where homogenization theory provides a systematic…

In all structural models, the section or fiber response is a relation between the strain measures and the stress resultants. This relation can only be expressed in a simple analytical form when the material response is linear elastic. For…

Collagen is the main structural and load-bearing element of various connective tissues, where it forms the extracellular matrix that supports cells. It has long been known that collagenous tissues exhibit a highly nonlinear stress-strain…