Related papers: Mechanics of a granular skin
Most studies on granular physics have focused on dry granular media, with no liquids between the grains. However, in geology and many real world applications (e.g., food processing, pharmaceuticals, ceramics, civil engineering,…
The mechanics of cohesive or cemented granular materials is complex, combining the heterogeneous responses of granular media, like force chains, with clearly defined material properties. Here, we use a discrete element model (DEM)…
A fungal skin is a thin flexible sheet of a living homogeneous mycelium made by a filamentous fungus. The skin could be used in future living architectures of adaptive buildings and as a sensing living skin for soft self-growing/adaptive…
Granular materials are involved in most industrial and environmental processes, as well as many civil engineering applications. Although significant advances have been made in understanding the statics and dynamics of cohesionless grains…
We investigate the phenomena of crater formation and gas release caused by projectile impact on underwater beds, which occurs in many natural, geophysical, and industrial applications. The bed in our experiment is constructed of hydrophobic…
Tissue-like materials are required in many robotic systems to improve human-machine interactions. However, the mechanical properties of living tissues are difficult to replicate. Synthetic materials are not usually capable of simultaneously…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and grains are omnipresent in daily life, industrial applications, and earth-science [1]. When unperturbed, they form stable structures that resemble the ones of other amorphous solids like metallic…
Granular materials, composed of discrete solid grains, can be modeled as simple mechanical systems. However, these materials can undergo spontaneous slow deformation, or creep, even under small forces and while in apparent mechanical…
Ceramic materials are ubiquitous in technologies operating under high mechanical, thermal or chemical constrains. Research in ceramic processing aims at creating ceramics with properties that are still challenging to obtain, such as…
The discrete element method constitutes a general class of modeling techniques to simulate the microscopic behavior (i.e. at the particle scale) of granular/soil materials. We present a contact dynamics method, accounting for the cohesive…
The ability to design and fabricate materials with tailored mechanical properties, combined with immunity to damage, is a frontier of materials engineering. For example, materials which are characterized by elastic properties that depend on…
By mixing glass beads with a curable polymer we create a well-defined cohesive granular medium, held together by solidified, and hence elastic, capillary bridges. This material has a geometry similar to a wet packing of beads, but with an…
Cohesive granular materials such as wet sand, snow, and powders can flow like a viscous liquid. However, the elementary mechanisms of momentum transport in such athermal particulate fluids are elusive. As a result, existing models for…
Soft-granular media, such as dense emulsions, foams or tissues, exhibit either fluid- or solid-like properties depending on the applied external stresses. Whereas bulk rheology of such materials has been thoroughly investigated, the…
Thousands of plant and animal species have been observed to have superhydrophobic surfaces that lead to various novel behaviors [1-5]. These observations have inspired attempts to create artificial superhydrophobic surfaces, given such…
Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature and industry; their mechanical behavior has been of academic and engineering interest for centuries. One of the reasons for their rather complex mechanical behavior is that stresses exerted on a…
As a complementary tool to laboratory experiments, discrete numerical simulation, applied to granular materials, provides valuable information on the grain and contact scale microstructure, thereby enabling one to better understand the…
Over the past few years, the study of magnetization dynamics in artificial spin ices has become a vibrant field of study. Artificial spin ices are ensembles of geometrically arranged, interacting magnetic nanoislands, which display…
If you walk on sand, it supports your weight. How do the disordered forces between particles in sand organize, to keep you from sinking? This simple question is surprisingly difficult to answer experimentally: measuring forces in three…
The presence of interparticle cohesion can drastically change the behavior of granular materials. For instance, powders are challenging to handle, and one can make a sandcastle using wet grains. In this study, we report experimental results…