Related papers: Actuation of thin nematic elastomer sheets with co…
A rectangular plate of dielectric elastomer exhibiting gradients of material properties through its thickness will deform inhomogeneously when a potential difference is applied to compliant electrodes on its major surfaces, because each…
We consider a one-dimensional variational problem arising in connection with a model for cholesteric liquid crystals. The principal feature of our study is the assumption that the twist deformation of the nematic director incurs much higher…
We develop a theory of the effective disorder temperature in glass-forming materials driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium by external forces. Our basic premise is that the slow configurational degrees of freedom of such materials are…
In liquid crystal elastomers, the orientational order of liquid crystals is coupled with elastic distortions of crosslinked polymer networks. Previous theoretical research has described these materials through two different approaches: a…
Using a well defined soft model glass in the framework of Molecular Dynamics simulations, the inherent structures are probed by means of a recently developed deformation protocol that aims to capture the Dynamical Heterogeneities (DH), as…
Nematic liquid crystals in a polyhedral domain, a prototype for bistable displays, may be described by a unit-vector field subject to tangent boundary conditions. Here we consider the case of a rectangular prism. For configurations with…
We model within the framework of finite elasticity two inherent instabilities observed in liquid crystal elastomers under uniaxial tension. First is necking which occurs when a material sample suddenly elongates more in a small region where…
We propose a dynamical theory of low-temperature shear deformation in amorphous solids. Our analysis is based on molecular-dynamics simulations of a two-dimensional, two-component noncrystalline system. These numerical simulations reveal…
Modeling liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) at the molecular level is crucial for the predictable design of energy-conversion and stimuli-responsive materials. Here, we develop a self-consistent field theory for LCEs which captures the…
We aimed to use finite element method to simulate the unique behaviors of liquid crystal elastomer, such as semi-soft elasticity, stripe domain instabilities etc. We started from an energy functional with the 2D Bladon-Warner-Terentjev…
We propose a model for nonlinearly elastic membranes undergoing finite deformations while confined to a regular frictionless surface in $\mathbb{R}^3$. This is a physically correct model of the analogy sometimes given to motivate harmonic…
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
Recent studies of azo-dye doped liquid crystal elastomers show a strong photomechanical response. We report on models that predict experimental results that suggest photothermal heating is the dominant mechanism in a planar constrained…
In this paper, the two-dimensional pure bending of a hyperelastic substrate coated by a nematic liquid crystal elastomer (abbreviated as NLCE) is studied within the framework of nonlinear elasticity. The governing system, arising from the…
Control of physical behaviors of nematic colloids and colloidal crystals has been demonstrated by tuning particle shape, topology, chirality and surface charging. However, the capability of altering physical behaviors of such soft matter…
Precise manipulation of shape-morphing responsive materials is crucial for applications in soft robotics and adaptive structures. While notable precision has been achieved in thin two-dimensional sheets, an accurate volumetric…
In this paper, we study an elastic bilayer plate composed of a nematic liquid crystal elastomer in the top layer and a nonlinearly elastic material in the bottom layer. While the bottom layer is assumed to be stress-free in the flat…
We demonstrate that two-dimensional crystals made of active particles can experience extremely large spontaneous deformations without melting. Using particles mostly interacting via pairwise repulsive forces, we show that such active…
We start from a variational model for nematic elastomers that involves two energies: mechanical and nematic. The first one consists of a nonlinear elastic energy which is influenced by the orientation of the molecules of the nematic…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked polymer networks covalently bonded with liquid crystal mesogens. In the nematic phase, due to strong coupling between mechanical strain and orientational order, these materials display…