Related papers: Strain-stiffening gels based on latent crosslinkin…

Solids deform and fluids flow, but soft glassy materials, such as emulsions, foams, suspensions, and pastes, exhibit an intricate mix of solid and liquid-like behavior. While much progress has been made to understand their elastic (small…

The behavior of microgels near surfaces and their adsorption is studied by simple scaling theory. Two different types of microgels can be studied, i.e., fractal type microgels and randomly crosslinked polymer chains. In the first case the…

We use numerical simulations and an athermal quasi-static shear protocol to investigate the yielding of a model colloidal gel. Under increasing deformation, the elastic regime is followed by a significant stiffening before yielding takes…

When a hydrophilic and deformable porous material is immersed in a bath, it may absorb the solvent and expand by several times its volume, thus forming a highly soft and porous hydrogel. A stress applied on the soft hydrogel surface deforms…

Granular chain packings exhibit a striking emergent strain-stiffening behavior despite the individual looseness of the constitutive chains. Using indentation experiments on such assemblies, we measure an exponential increase in the…

The behavior of cross-linking polymer solutions as they transition from liquid-like to solid-like material in flow determines success or failure in several applications. Dilute polymer solutions flow easily, while concentrated polymers or…

Strain stiffening of protein networks is explored by means of a finite strain analysis of a two-dimensional network model of cross-linked semiflexible filaments. The results show that stiffening is caused by non-affine network…

By means of Langevin dynamics simulations, we investigate the gel formation of randomly functionalized polymers in solution, with the ability to form both intra- and intermolecular reversible bonds. Under highly dilute conditions, these…

The structural complexity of soft gels is at the origin of a versatile mechanical response that allows for large deformations, controlled elastic recovery and toughness in the same material. A limit to exploiting the potential of such…

Predicting the mechanical response of the soft gel materials under external deformation is of paramount importance in many areas, such as foods, pharmaceuticals, solid-liquid separations, cosmetics, aerogels and drug delivery. Most of the…

Natural and synthetic multi-component gels display emergent properties, which implies that they are more than just the sum of their components. This warrants the investigation of the role played by inter-species interactions in shaping gel…

Readily synthesizable nano-graphene and poly ethylene glycol based stable gels have been synthesized employing an easy refluxing method and exhaustive rheological and viscoelastic characterizations have been performed to understand the…

Three-dimensional DNA networks, composed of tri- or higher valent nanostars with sticky, single-stranded DNA overhangs, have been previously studied in the context of designing thermally responsive, viscoelastic hydrogels. In this work, we…

Suspensions are of wide interest and form the basis for many smart fluids. For most suspensions, the viscosity decreases with increasing shear rate, i.e. they shear thin. Few are reported to do the opposite, i.e. shear thicken, despite the…

Most tough hydrogels are reinforced by introducing sacrificial structures that can dissipate input energy. However, since the sacrificial damages cannot recover instantly, the toughness of these gels drops substantially during consecutive…

When sheared, most elastic solids such as metals, rubbers and polymer hydrogels dilate in the direction perpendicular to the shear plane. This well-known behaviour known as the Poynting effect is characterized by a positive normal stress.…

Surface stress, also known as surface tension, is a fundamental material property of any interface. However, measurements of solid surface stress in traditional engineering materials, such as metals and oxides, have proven to be very…

Networks of filamentous proteins play a crucial role in cell mechanics. These cytoskeletal networks, together with various crosslinking and other associated proteins largely determine the (visco)elastic response of cells. In this letter we…

Hydrogels are biphasic, swollen polymer networks where elastic deformation is coupled to nanoscale fluid flow. As a consequence, hydrogels can withstand large strains and exhibit nonlinear, hyperelastic properties. For low-modulus hydrogel…

Colloidal gel networks are disordered elastic solids that can form even in extremely dilute particle suspensions. With interaction strengths comparable to the thermal energy, their stress-bearing network can locally restructure via breaking…