Related papers: From bioinspired multifunctionality to mimumes

The application of granular jamming in soft robotics is a recent and promising new technology offer exciting possibilities for creating higher performance robotic devices. Granular jamming is achieved via the application of a vacuum…

It is important to accurately model materials' properties at lower length scales (micro-level) while translating the effects to the components and/or system level (macro-level) can significantly reduce the amount of experimentation required…

Quantifying the relationship between geometric descriptors of microstructure and effective properties like permeability is essential for understanding and improving the behavior of porous materials. In this paper, we employ a previously…

The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…

Partitioning of (bio)materials in polymeric mixtures is a key phenomenon both in cellular environments, as well as in industrial applications. In cells, several macromolecules are suspended within different biomolecular phases. On the other…

Cellulose, as a naturally abundant and biocompatible material, is still gaining interest due to its high potential for functionalization. This makes cellulose a promising candidate for replacing plastics. Understanding how cellulose…

Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…

This paper investigates the influence of interfaces on the performance of finite-sized mechanical metamaterial structures for vibration damping applications. The metamaterial structures are designed in a sandwich configuration in which two…

Digital modeling of the microstructure is important for studying the physical and transport properties of porous media. Multiscale modeling for porous media can accurately characterize macro-pores and micro-pores in a large-FoV (field of…

Dielectric structures composed of many inclusions that manipulate light in ways the bulk materials cannot are commonly seen in the field of metamaterials. In these structures, each inclusion depends on a set of parameters such as location…

Materials made from active, living, or robotic components can display emergent properties arising from local sensing and computation. Here, we realize a freestanding active metabeam with piezoelectric elements and electronic feed-forward…

This work presents BioPykrete, a new sustainable bio-composite material created from ice, nano-crystalline cellulose (CNC), and a tailor-made chimera protein designed to bind the two together. We developed and produced the chimera protein…

The ability to control Poisson's ratio of functional materials has been one of the main objectives of researchers attempting to develop structures efficient from the perspective of protective, biomedical and soundproofing devices. This task…

Aside from the capability of additive manufacturing (AM) methods in fabricating components with complex geometries, two crucial potentials of this manufacturing process that are worth mentioning are its flexibility in being combined with…

High strength and high toughness are usually mutually exclusive in engineering materials. Improving the toughness of strong but brittle materials like ceramics thus relies on the introduction of a metallic or polymeric ductile phase to…

By evaporating a drop of lipid dispersion we generate the myelin morphology often seen in dissolving surfactant powders. We explain these puzzling nonequilibrium structures using a geometric argument: The bilayer repeat spacing increases…

Decades after being replaced with digital platforms, analogue computing has experienced a surging interest following developments in metamaterials and intricate fabrication techniques. Specifically, wave-based analogue computers which…

Properties of engineering materials are generally influenced by defects such as point defects (vacancies, interstitials, substitutional defects), line defects (dislocations), planar defects (grain boundaries, free surfaces/nanostructures,…

Smooth and curved microstructural topologies found in nature - from soap films to trabecular bone - have inspired several mimetic design spaces for architected metamaterials and bio-scaffolds. However, the design approaches so far have been…

Nowadays, multiscale modelling is recognized as the most suitable way to study biological processes. Indeed, almost every phenomenon in nature exhibits a multiscale behaviour, i.e., it is the outcome of interactions that occur at different…