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Measuring stress levels in loaded structures is crucial to assess and monitor their health, and to predict the length of their remaining structural life. However, measuring stress non-destructively has proved quite challenging. Many…
The damage and fracture of materials are technologically of enormous interest due to their economic and human cost. They cover a wide range of phenomena like e.g. cracking of glass, aging of concrete, the failure of fiber networks in the…
Soft materials including elastomers and gels are pervasive in biological systems and technological applications. Whereas it is known that intrinsic fracture energies of soft materials are relatively low, how the intrinsic fracture energy…
We report the simultaneous softening and compaction of a confined dense granular pack in acoustic resonance experiments. Elastic softening is manifested by a reduction of the shear-wave speed, as the wave amplitude increases beyond some…
The rheology of cohesive granular materials, under a constant pressure condition, is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. Depending on the shear rate, pressure, and interparticle cohesiveness, the system exhibits four distinctive…
We consider gelation of colloidal particles in suspension after cessation of shear flow. Particle aggregation is driven by a temperature-tunable attractive potential which controls the growth of clusters under isothermal conditions. A…
We provide the first characterization of the nonlinear and time dependent rheologic response of viscoelastic bottom-up holographic models. More precisely, we perform oscillatory shear tests in holographic massive gravity theories with…
Highly-deformable materials, from synthetic hydrogels to biological tissues, are becoming increasingly important from both fundamental and practical perspectives. Their mechanical behaviors, in particular the dynamics of crack propagation…
We report on the fluidization dynamics of an attractive gel composed of non-Brownian particles made of fused silica colloids. Extensive rheology coupled to ultrasonic velocimetry allows us to characterize the global stress response together…
It is shown here that fracture after a brief plastic strain, typically of a few percents, is a necessary consequence of the polycrystalline nature of the materials. The polycrystal undergoing plastic deformation is modeled as a flowing…
Seismic attenuation in granular porous media is of paramount importance in rock physics and seismology. Unlike sandstones, shales are mixtures of sand grains and clays with extremely low porosity and permeability. Swelling of clays upon…
The compressive yield stress of particle gels shows a highly nonlinear dependence on the packing fraction. We have studied continuous compression processes, and discussed the packing fraction dependence with the particle scale…
Torsional oscillator experiments show evidence of mass decoupling in solid 4He. This decoupling is amplitude dependent, suggesting a critical velocity for supersolidity. We observe similar behavior in the elastic shear modulus. By measuring…
We study the noise characteristics of stochastic oscillations in protein number dynamics of simple genetic oscillatory systems. Using the three-component negative feedback transcription regulatory system called the repressilator as a…
Integrated photoelasticity is investigated for a soft material subjected to a three-dimensional stress state. In the experiment, a solid sphere is pressed against a gelatin gel (Young's modulus is about 4.2 kPa) that deforms up to 4.5 mm…
The proposed two-dimensional geometrically exact beam element extends our previous work by including the effects of shear distortion, and also of distributed forces and moments acting along the beam. The general flexibility-based…
Tearing a thin sheet by forcing a rigid object through it leads to complex crack morphologies; a single oscillatory crack arises when a tool is driven laterally through a brittle sheet, while two diverging cracks and a series of…
We predict a phenomenon of catastrophic material failure arising suddenly within an amorphous material, with an extremely long delay time since the material was last deformed. By simulating a mesoscopic soft glassy rheology model in one…
We used computer simulations to study spontaneous strain localization in granular materials, as a result of symmetry breaking non-homogeneous deformations. Axisymmetric triaxial shear tests were simulated by means of standard…
We study theoretically the dynamical process of yielding in cyclically sheared amorphous materials, within a thermal elastoplastic model and the soft glassy rheology model. Within both models we find an initially slow accumulation, over…