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Synthetic copolymers and biopolymers, such as polypeptides and double-stranded DNA, often exhibit strong variations in bending stiffness along their contour, which can significantly impact conformational behavior at larger scales. To…
The mechanical properties of a polymeric network containing both crosslinks and sliplinks (entanglements) are studied using a multi-chain Brownian dynamics simulation. We coarse-grain at the level of chain segments connecting consecutive…
Here, the general design and properties of new multiple network elastomers with an exceptional combination of stiffness, toughness, and elasticity are reported. In this paper, it is reported in more detail how the increase in strain at…
The stress response of polymer double networks depends not only on the properties of the constituent networks, but also on the interactions arising between them. Here we demonstrate, via coarse-grained simulations, that both their global…
This paper presents a comprehensive computational framework for investigating thermo-elastic fracture in transversely isotropic materials, where classical linear elasticity fails to predict physically realistic behavior near stress…
We performed molecular dynamics simulations to study equilibrium and flow properties of a liquid in a nano-channel with confining surfaces coated with a layer of grafted semiflexible polymers. The coverage spans a wide range of grafting…
We reveal significant qualitative differences in the rigidity transition of three types of disordered network materials: randomly diluted spring networks, jammed sphere packings, and stress-relieved networks that are diluted using a…
We consider equilibrium relaxation properties of the end-to-end distance and of principal components in a one-dimensional polymer chain model with nonlinear interaction between the beads. While for the single-well potentials these…
We analyze the nonequilibrium dynamics of single inextensible semiflexible biopolymers as stretching forces are applied at the ends. Based on different (contradicting) heuristic arguments, various scaling laws have been proposed for the…
We derive an orthotropic model to describe the cyclic stress-softening of a carbon-filled rubber vulcanizate through multiple stress-strain cycles with increasing values of the maximum strain. We specialize the deformation to pure shear…
Simulations are used to examine the microscopic origins of strain hardening in polymer glasses. While stress-strain curves for a wide range of temperature can be fit to the functional form predicted by entropic network models, many other…
Predicting the macroscopic mechanical behavior of polymeric materials from the micro-structural features has remained a challenge for decades. Existing theoretical models often fail to accurately capture the experimental data, due to…
We show the existence of global-in-time weak solutions to a general class of coupled bead-spring chain models that arise from the kinetic theory of dilute solutions of nonhomogeneous polymeric liquids with noninteracting polymer chains,…
Adhesion hysteresis can be caused by elastic instabilities that are triggered by surface roughness or chemical heterogeneity. However, the role of these instabilities in adhesion hysteresis remains poorly understood because we lack…
In this contribution, we present a new Materials Knowledge System framework for microstructure-sensitive predictions of effective stress--strain responses in composite materials. The model is developed for composites with a wide range of…
We investigate the global existence of weak solutions to a free boundary problem governing the evolution of finitely extensible bead-spring chains in dilute polymers. We construct weak solutions of the two-phase model by performing the…
Soft biological tissues exhibit a remarkable resilience to large mechanical loads, a property which is associated with the strain stiffening capability of the biopolymer networks that structurally support the tissues. Yet, recent studies…
We propose a nonlinear elasto-plastic model, for which a specific class of hyperbolic elasticity arises as a straight consequence of the yield criterion invariance on the plasticity level. We superimpose this nonlinear elastic (or…
A few experiments have reported that the time development of shear stress under fast start-up shear deformations exhibits double peaks before reaching the steady state for bimodal blends of entangled linear polymers in specific conditions.…
We propose a nonlinear extension of the standard tube model for semidilute solutions of freely-sliding semiflexible polymers. Non-affine filament deformations at the entanglement scale, the renormalisation of direct interactions by thermal…