Related papers: Geometry-driven folding of a floating annular shee…
We establish the existence of a cusp in the curvature of a solid sheet at its contact with a liquid subphase. We study two configurations in floating sheets where the solid-vapor-liquid contact line is a straight line and a circle,…
Understanding the mechanical response and failure of solids is of obvious importance in their use as structural materials. The nature of plastic deformation leading to yielding of amorphous solids has been vigorously pursued in recent…
We propose bending energies for isotropic elastic plates and shells. For a plate, we define and employ a surface tensor that symmetrically couples stretch and curvature such that any elastic energy density constructed from its invariants is…
Thin liquid films on surfaces are part of our everyday life, they serve e.g. as coatings or lubricants. The stability of a thin layer is governed by interfacial forces, described by the effective interface potential, and has been subject of…
Soft elastic filaments that can be stretched, bent and twisted exhibit a range of topologically and geometrically complex morphologies that include plectonemes, solenoids, knot-like and braid-like structures. We combine numerical…
We demonstrate that tunable attractive (bonding) and repulsive (anti-bonding) forces can arise in highly asymmetric structures coupled to external radiation, a consequence of the bonding/anti-bonding level repulsion of guided-wave…
Stretched polymers with attractive interaction are studied in two and three dimensions. They are described by biased self-avoiding random walks with nearest neighbour attraction. The bias corresponds to opposite forces applied to the first…
Understanding the mechanical instabilities of two-dimensional membranes has strong connection to the subjects of structure instabilities, morphology control and materials failures. In this work, we investigate the plastic mechanism…
We explore the effect of an attractive interaction between parallel-aligned polymers, which are perpendicularly grafted on a substrate. Such an attractive interaction could be due to, e.g., reversible cross-links. The competition between…
The nonequilibrium structural and dynamical properties of semiflexible active polar polymers subject to linear flow are studied by numerical simulations. Filaments are confined in two dimensions and immersed in a fluid described by the…
The buckling of elastic bodies is a common phenomenon in the mechanics of solids. Wrinkling of membranes can often be interpreted as buckling under constraints that prohibit large amplitude deformation. We present a combination of analytic…
Entangled states are ubiquitous amongst fibrous materials, whether naturally occurring (keratin, collagen, DNA) or synthetic (nanotube assemblies, elastane). A key mechanical characteristic of these systems is their ability to reorganise in…
Large scale features of a randomly isotropically forced incompressible and unbounded rotating fluid are examined in perturbation theory. At first order in both the random force amplitude and the angular velocity we find two types of…
Hydrodynamic forces may significantly affect the motion of polymers. In sheet-like cavities, such as the cell's cytoplasm and microfluidic channels, the hydrodynamic forces are long-range. It is therefore expected that that hydrodynamic…
We present a pedagogical review of the swelling thermodynamics and phase transitions of polymer gels. In particular, we discuss how features of the volume phase transition of the gel's osmotic equilibrium is analogous to other transitions…
In this letter, we investigate the geometrically tailorable elasticity in the twisting behavior of biomimetic scale-covered slender soft substrate. Motivated by our qualitative experiments showing a significant torsional rigidity increase,…
Amorphous materials exhibit complex material proprteties with strongly nonlinear behaviors. Below a yield stress they behave as plastic solids, while they start to yield above a critical stress $\Sigma_c$. A key quantity controlling…
We study the adhesion of an elastic sheet on a rigid spherical substrate. Gauss'Theorema Egregium shows that this operation necessarily generates metric distortions (i.e. stretching) as well as bending. As a result, a large variety of…
Within the linearized three-dimensional theory of polymer gels, we consider a sequence of problems formulated on a family of cylindrical domains whose height tends to zero. We assume that the fluid pressure is controlled at the top and…
We study the indentation of ultrathin elastic sheets clamped to the edge of a circular hole. This classical setup has received considerable attention lately, being used by various experimental groups as a probe to measure the surface…