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We analyse bead--spring polymers coupled to Navier--Stokes turbulence in ultra--dilute solutions at Weissenberg number \(Wi\approx 80\). The polymers do not alter the large-scale turbulent structure, but hydrodynamic interactions generate…
The mechanical response of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and polyampholyte (PA) chains is vital for understanding their biological functions and designing functional materials. We investigate the force-extension behavior of a PA…
Molecular dynamic simulation enables one to correlate the evolution of the micro-structure with anisotropic stress when a material is subject to strain. The anisotropic stress due to a constant strain-rate load in a cross-linked polymer is…
Although the non-equilibrium behaviour of polymer solutions is generally well understood, particularly in extensional flow, there remain several unanswered questions for dilute solutions in simple shear flow, and full quantitative agreement…
Strain energy density is calculated for a network of flexible chains with weak excluded-volume interactions (whose energy is small compared with thermal energy). Constitutive equations are developed for an incompressible network of chains…
The mechanical properties of many supramolecular materials are often determined by non-covalent interactions that arise from an interplay between chemical composition and molecular microstructural organization. The reversible nature of…
We study the physics of the strong-coupling Hubbard model in a kagome lattice ribbon under mechanical tension and half-filling. It is known that in the absence of strain, the lattice symmetry of the system and strong electronic interactions…
Taking into account the nonequivalence of fixed-force and fixed-length ensembles in the weak-force regime, equations of state are derived that describe the equilibrium extension or compression of an ideal Gaussian polymer chain in response…
The collective action of actively contractile units embedded in elastic biopolymer networks plays a crucial role in regulating the network's macroscopic mechanical response. Here, we investigate how the macroscopic boundary stress in model…
A thermodynamically related model is developed for describing elastic rubber-like behavior of amorphous and crystallizing polymers and demonstrated on example of simple extension. Both the “entropic” and “energetic”…
We consider a statistical mechanical model of a generic flexible polyelectrolyte, comprised of identically charged monomers with long range electrostatic interactions, and short-range interactions quantified by a disorder field along the…
We investigate theoretically the effect of polymer tension on the collective behavior of reversibly binding cross-links. For this purpose, we employ a model of two weakly bending wormlike chains aligned in parallel by a tensile force, with…
Semiflexible polymers such as filamentous actin play a vital role in the mechanical behavior of cells, yet the basic properties of cross-linked F-actin networks remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we have performed numerical…
We analyze the stretching elasticity of a wormlike chain with a tension discontinuity resulting from a Hookean spring connecting its backbone to a fixed point. The elasticity of isolated semiflexible filaments has been the subject in a…
Biopolymer networks from the intracellular to tissue scale display high rigidity and tensile stress while having coordinations well below the normal threshold for mechanical rigidity. The elastic filaments in these networks are often…
We study the mechanical and conformational properties of networks of helical polymers with a combination of Monte Carlo simulations based on the Wang-Landau algorithm and the Three-chain Model. We find that the stress-strain behavior of…
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…
Discrete element (DEM) simulations demonstrate that granular materials are non-simple, meaning that the incremental stiffness of a granular assembly depends on the gradients of the strain increment as well as on the strain increment itself.…
Networks of filamentous proteins play a crucial role in cell mechanics. These cytoskeletal networks, together with various crosslinking and other associated proteins largely determine the (visco)elastic response of cells. In this letter we…
We study the effect of mergers in the force chain model describing the stress profile in static granular materials. Combining numerical and analytical calculations we show that granular materials do not generally behave in an elastic-like…