Related papers: Strain-stiffening gels based on latent crosslinkin…
Colloidal gels are widely applied in industry due to their rheological character -- no flow takes place below the yield stress. Such property enables gels to maintain uniform distribution in practical formulations; otherwise, solid…
The yielding of foams, concentrated emulsions, pastes and other soft materials under applied strain is often characterized by measuring the complex shear modulus as a function of strain amplitude at low frequency. Results obtained for…
Several mechanisms cause a granular material to strengthen over time at low applied stress. The strength is determined from the maximum frictional force F_max experienced by a shearing plate in contact with wet or dry granular material…
A new strain energy function for the hyperelastic modelling of ligaments and tendons whose fascicles have a helical arrangement of fibrils is derived. The stress-strain response of a single fascicle whose fibrils exhibit varying levels of…
Spinodal demixing of systems into two phases having very different viscosities leads to viscoelastic networks, i.e. gels. Here we consider demixing in a colloidal system where one phase is a nematic liquid crystal with a strongly…
Soft adhesive contacts are ubiquitous in nature and are increasingly used in synthetic systems, such as flexible electronics and soft robots, due to their advantages over traditional joining techniques. While methods to study the failure of…
The antiplane strain Green's functions for an applied concentrated force and moment are obtained for Cosserat elastic solids with extreme anisotropy, which can be tailored to bring the material in a state close to an instability threshold…
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…
Hydrogels are widespread soft materials, which can serve a wide range of applications. The control over the viscoelastic properties of the gel is of paramount importance. Ongoing environmental issues have raised the consumer's concern…
Disordered biopolymer gels have striking mechanical properties including strong nonlinearities. In the case of athermal gels (such as collagen-I) the nonlinearity has long been associated with a crossover from a bending dominated to a…
Gels are low-packing arrested states of matter which are able to support stress. On cooling, limited valence colloidal particles form open networks stabilized by the progressive increase of the interparticle bond lifetime. These gels, named…
We study colloidal gels formed by competing electrostatic repulsion and short-range attraction by means of extensive numerical simulations under external shear. We show that, upon varying the repulsion strength, the gel structure and its…
Glasses behave as solids on experimental time scales due to their slow relaxation. Growing dynamic length scales due to cooperative motion of particles are believed to be central to this slow response. For quiescent glasses, however, the…
We use dedicated microfluidic devices to expose soft hydrogel particles to a rapid change in the externally applied osmotic pressure and observe a non-monotonic response: After an initial rapid compression the particle slowly reswells to…
Residual stress engineering is very widely used in the design of new advanced lightweight materials. For metallic glasses the attention has been on structural changes and rejuvenation processes. High energy scanning X-ray diffraction strain…
Liquid crystal elastomer films that morph into cones are strikingly capable lifters. Thus motivated, we combine theory, numerics, and experiments to reexamine the load-bearing capacity of conical shells. We show that a cone squashed between…
Understanding the origin of the unique rheological properties of wheat gluten, the protein fraction of wheat grain, is crucial in bread-making processes and questions scientists since polymeric glutenins. To better understand the respective…
Cytoskeletal gels are prototyped to reproduce the mechanical contraction of the cytoskeleton in-vitro. They are composed of a polymer network (backbone), swollen by the presence of a liquid solvent, and active molecules (molecular motors,…
Glasses and gels are the two dynamically arrested, disordered states of matter. Despite their importance, their similarities and differences remain elusive, especially at high density. We identify dynamical and structural signatures which…
A Twinning Induced Plasticity (TWIP) steel with a nominal composition of Fe-16.4Mn-0.9C-0.5Si-0.05Nb-0.05V was deformed to an engineering strain of 6\%. The strain around the deformation twins were mapped using the 4D-STEM technique. Strain…