Related papers: Disorder, pre-stress and non-affinity in polymer 8…
The toughness of a polymer material can increase significantly if two networks are combined into one material. This toughening effect is a consequence of a transition from a brittle to a ductile failure response. Although this transition…
Athermal models of disordered fibrous networks are highly useful for studying the mechanics of elastic networks composed of stiff biopolymers. The underlying network architecture is a key aspect that can affect the elastic properties of…
We contrast the distinct frameworks of materials design and physical learning in creating elastic networks with desired stable states. In design, the desired states are specified in advance and material parameters can be optimized on a…
In this work I have studied the effect of disorder and system size in fiber bundle model with a certain range of stress redistribution. The strength of the bundle as well as the failure abruptness is observed with varying disorder, stress…
Motivated by recent experiments showing nonlinear elasticity of in vitro networks of the biopolymer actin cross-linked with filamin, we present an effective medium theory of flexibly cross-linked stiff polymer networks. We model such…
This study presents a Eulerian theory to elucidate the molecular kinematics in polymer networks and their connection to continuum deformation, grounded in fundamental statistical physics and thermodynamics. Three key innovations are…
The stress-strain relationship of biological soft tissues affected by Marfan's syndrome is believed to be non-convex. More specifically, Haughton and Merodio recently proposed a strain-energy density leading to localized strain softening,…
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…
We present theoretical and experimental studies of the elastic response of fibrous networks subjected to uniaxial strain. Uniaxial compression or extension is applied to extracellular networks of fibrin and collagen using a shear rheometer…
Solutions of polymer chains are modelled using non-equilibrium Brownian dynamics simulations, with physically associative beads which form reversible crosslinks to establish a system-spanning physical gel network. Rheological properties…
Constitutive equations are derived for the time-dependent behavior of particle-reinforced elastomers at isothermal loading with finite strains. A rubbery polymer is modelled as a network of macromolecules bridged by junctions which can slip…
The validity of the affine assumption in model flexible polymer networks is explored. To this end, the displacements of fluorescent tracer beads embedded in polyacrylamide gels are quantified by confocal microscopy under shear deformation,…
This paper presents a combined numerical-theoretical study of the macroscopic behavior and local field distributions in a special class of two-dimensional periodic composites with viscoplastic phases. The emphasis is on strongly nonlinear…
The response to a localized force provides a sensitive test for different models of stress transmission in granular solids. The elasto-plastic models traditionally used by engineers have been challenged by theoretical and experimental…
We image semi-flexible polymer networks under shear at the micrometer scale. By tracking embedded probe particles, we determine the local strain field, and directly measure its uniformity, or degree of affineness, on scales of 2-100 micron.…
The mechanical properties of biological materials are spatially heterogeneous. Typical tissues are made up of a spanning fibrous extracellular matrix in which various inclusions, such as living cells, are embedded. While the influence of…
It has been established that the entangled polymer dynamics can be reasonably described by single chain models such as tube and slip-link models. Although the entanglement effect is a result of the hard-core interaction between chains,…
Predicting the rheological behavior of associative polymers bridging colloidal particles into transient networks is fundamentally challenging because the coupled spatiotemporal scales prevent efficient molecular-fidelity modeling. We…
Networks of semiflexible or stiff polymers such as most biopolymers are known to deform inhomogeneously when sheared. The effects of such non-affine deformation have been shown to be much stronger than for flexible polymers. To date, our…
We show the existence of global-in-time weak solutions to a general class of coupled Hookean-type bead-spring chain models that arise from the kinetic theory of dilute solutions of polymeric liquids with noninteracting polymer chains. The…