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Due to their exceptional mechanical and chemical properties and their natural abundance, cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) are promising building blocks of sustainable polymer composites. However, the rapid gelation of CNC dispersions has…
Recently, it has been found experimentally that hydrated nacre exhibits a nonlinear mechanical response. While mechanical nonlinearity has been shown to be important in other biological structures, such as spider webs, the implications of…
We report on the ab initio discovery of a novel putative ground state for quasi two-dimensional TiO$_2$ through a structural search using the minima hopping method with an artificial neural network potential. The structure is based on a…
Living systems are built of multiscale-composites: materials formed of components with different properties that are assembled in complex micro- and nano-structures. Such biological multiscale-composites often show outstanding physical…
There is great interest in the study of topological insulator-based heterostructures due to expected emerging phenomena. However, a challenge of topological insulator (TI) research is the contribution of the bulk conduction to the TI…
Self-assembling peptides (SAPs) have shown to offer great promise in therapeutics and have the ability to undergo self-assembly and form ordered nanostructures. However SAP gels are often associated with inherent weak and transient…
Living tissues show an extraordinary adaptiveness to strain, which is crucial for their proper biological functioning. The physical origin of this mechanical behaviour has been widely investigated using reconstituted networks of collagen…
This paper introduces the chain lattice, a hierarchical truss structure comprising two interpenetrating lattices. One lattice toughens the material and prevents catastrophic localized failure while the other lattice serves as a porous…
The ability to assemble mesoscopic colloidal lattices above a surface is important for fundamental studies related with nucleation and crystallization, but also for a variety of technological applications in photonics and micro-engineering.…
The hardest materials in living organisms are biologically grown crystalline minerals, or biominerals, which are also incredibly fracture-tough. Biomineral mesostructure includes size, shape, spatial arrangement, and crystal orientation of…
Nanocomposites comprising of high surface area adsorption materials and nanosized transition metals have emerged as a promising strategy for hydrogen storage application due to their inherent ability to store atomic and molecular forms of…
In a hierarchical nanopatterning routine relying exclusively on self-assembly processes we combine crystal surface reconstruction, microphase separation of copolymers, and selective metal diffusion to produce monodisperse metal…
Materials that are lightweight yet exhibit superior mechanical properties are of compelling importance for several technological applications that range from aircrafts to household appliances. Lightweight materials allow energy saving and…
Heterostructured (HS) materials exhibit excellent mechanical properties, combining high strength and significant ductility. Hetero-deformation-induced (HDI) hardening and strain de-localization are key to their strength-ductility synergy.…
The two-phase composite approach of Estrin et al. (1998) describes an evolving dislocation cell structure. Mckenzie et al. (2007) enhanced the model to capture the effects of hydrostatic pressure and temperature during severe plastic…
Bone serves as a remarkable example of nature's architectured material with its unique blend of strength and toughness, all at a lightweight design. Given the hierarchical nature of these materials, it is essential to understand the…
Hierarchically structured cellular solids have attracted increasing attention for their superior mass-specific mechanical properties. Using a remeshing-based continuum finite element (FE) framework, we reveal that two-scale metallic…
Supercrystalline nanocomposites (SCNCs) are inorganic-organic hybrid materials with a unique periodic nanostructure, and as such they have been gaining growing attention for their intriguing functional properties and parallelisms with…
Spinodal decomposition is proposed for stabilizing self-assembled interfaces between topological insulators (TIs) by combining layers of iso-structural and iso-valent TlBi$X_2$ ($X$=S, Se, Te) materials. The composition range for gapless…
Multiscale techniques have been widely shown to potentially overcome the limitation of homogenization schemes in representing the microscopic failure mechanisms in heterogeneous media as well as their influence on their structural response…