Related papers: Microstructure-enabled control of wrinkling in nem…
Periodic wrinkling of a rigid capping layer on a deformable substrate provides a useful method for templating surface topography for a variety of novel applications. Many experiments have studied wrinkle formation during the compression of…
Smart surfaces that reversibly change the interfacial friction coefficients in response to external stimuli enable a wide range of applications, such as grips, seals, brake pads, packaging films, and fabrics. Here a new concept of such a…
We present a computational study of sliding between gold clusters and a highly oriented pyrolytic graphite substrate, a material system that exhibits ultra-low friction due to structural lubricity. By means of molecular dynamics, it is…
We consider the axial compression of a thin sheet wrapped around a rigid cylindrical substrate. In contrast to the wrinkling-to-fold transitions exhibited in similar systems, we find that the sheet always buckles into a single symmetric…
The shear-transformation-zone (STZ) theory of plastic deformation predicts that sufficiently soft, non-crystalline solids are linearly unstable against forming periodic arrays of microstructural shear bands. A limited nonlinear analysis…
In vivo and in vitro systems of cells and extra-cellular matrix (ECM) systems are well known to form ordered patterns of orientationally aligned fibers. Here, we interpret them as active analogs of the (disordered) isotropic to the…
Control of frictional interactions among liquid-suspended particles has led to tunable, strikingly non-Newtonian rheology via the formation of strong flow constraints as particles come into close proximity under shear. Typically, these…
Uniaxial elastomers are characterized by five elastic constants. If their elastic modulus C_5 describing the energy of shear strains in planes containing the anisotropy axis vanishes, they are said to be soft. In spatial dimensions d less…
Twisted and rope-like assemblies of filamentous molecules are common and vital structural elements in cells and tissue of living organisms. We study the intrinsic frustration occurring in these materials between the two-dimensional…
In liquid-crystalline elastomers, the nematic order parameter and the induced strain vary smoothly across the isotropic-nematic transition, without the expected first-order discontinuity. To investigate this smooth variation, we measure the…
Active matter locally converts chemical energy into mechanical work and, for this reason, it provides new mechanisms of pattern formation. In particular, active gels made of protein motors and filaments are far-from-equilibrium systems that…
We provide a clear energetic insight into the catastrophic nature of the so-called creasing and pull-in instabilities in soft electro-active elastomers. These phenomena are ubiquitous for thin electro-elastic plates and are a major obstacle…
It is well known that an elastic sheet loaded in tension will wrinkle and that the length scale of the wrinkles tends to zero with vanishing thickness of the sheet [Cerda and Mahadevan, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 074302 (2003)]. We give the first…
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…
Constitutive equations are derived for the viscoelastic behavior of filled elastomers at isothermal loading with finite strains. A particle-reinforced rubber is thought of as a composite where regions with low concentrations of junctions…
Buckling induced by viscous flow changes the shape of sheet-like nanomaterial particles suspended in liquids. This instability at the particle scale affects collective behavior of suspension flows and has many technological and biological…
The interplay between active matter and its environment is central to understanding emergent behavior in biological and synthetic systems. Here, we show that coupling active nematic flows to small-amplitude deformations of a compliant…
Liquid crystals have attracted enormous interest because of the variety of their phases and richness of their application. The interplay of general physical symmetries and specific molecular features generates a myriad of different…
Elastomers are viscoelastic materials and their properties significantly depend on the loading rate. The actual stress experienced by these materials is the sum of equilibrium and dissipative (inelastic) terms. At very low loading rates we…
A classical problem in elasticity theory involves an inhomogeneity embedded in a material of given stress and shear moduli. The inhomogeneity is a region of arbitrary shape whose stress and shear moduli differ from those of the surrounding…