Related papers: Hierarchical excluded volume screening in solution…
During the past decades, notable improvements have been achieved in the understanding of static and dynamic properties of granular materials, giving rise to appealing new concepts like jamming, force chains, non-local rheology or the…
We investigate with numerical simulations the influence of topology and stiffness on macroscopic rheological properties of polymer melts consisting of unknotted, knotted or concatenated rings. While melts of flexible, knotted oligomer rings…
The rapid collapse of a polymer, due to external forces or changes in solvent, yields a long-lived `crumpled globule.' The conjectured fractal structure shaped by hierarchical collapse dynamics has proved difficult to establish, even with…
Extensibility is beyond the paradigm of classical soft glassy materials, and more broadly, yield-stress fluids. Recently, model yield-stress fluids with significant extensibility have been designed by adding polymeric phases to classically…
Building structures with hierarchical order through the self-assembly of smaller blocks is not only a prerogative of nature, but also a strategy to design artificial materials with tailored functions. We explore in simulation the…
The interplay of topological constraints, excluded volume interactions, persistence length and dynamical entanglement length in solutions and melts of linear chains and ring polymers is investigated by means of kinetic Monte Carlo…
We have developed a new multiscale simulation technique to investigate history-dependent flow behavior of entangled polymer melt, using a smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation with microscopic simulators that account for the dynamics…
The macroscopic mechanical properties of colloidal particle gels strongly depend on the local arrangement of the powder particles. Experiments have shown that more heterogeneous microstructures exhibit up to one order of magnitude higher…
Syntactic foams are composite materials frequently used in applications requiring the properties of low density and high damage tolerance. In the present work, polymer-based syntactic foams were studied under cyclic compression in order to…
We investigate the mechanical properties of amorphous polymers by means of coarse-grained simulations and nonaffine lattice dynamics theory. A small increase of polymer chain bending stiffness leads first to softening of the material, while…
The ability to design the scattering properties of electromagnetic structures is of fundamental interest in optical science and engineering. While there has been great practical success applying local optimization methods to electromagnetic…
From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…
The absorption of sound has great significance in many scientific and engineering applications, from room acoustics to noise mitigation. In this context, porous materials have emerged as a viable solution towards high absorption performance…
The miscibility of polymer blends, a classical problem in polymer science, may be altered, if one or both of the component do not have chain ends. Based on the idea of {\it topological volume}, we propose a mean-field theory to clarify how…
Topological constraints can affect both equilibrium and dynamic properties of polymer systems, and can play a role in the organization of chromosomes. Despite many theoretical studies, the effects of topological constraints on the…
This study determines the volume-fraction reduction of sheared fragile glass-forming liquids. We consider a group of hypothetical systems that consist of particles with anisotropic particle-size modulations yet have almost the same average…
By using fluid-kinetic simulations of confined and concentrated emulsion droplets, we investigate the nature of space non-homogeneity in soft-glassy dynamics and provide quantitative measurements of the statistical features of plastic…
We study the effect of physical aging on the mechanical properties of a model polymer glass using molecular dynamics simulations. The creep compliance is determined simultaneously with the structural relaxation under a constant uniaxial…
Hierarchically structured natural materials possess functionalities unattainable to the same components organized or mixed in simpler ways. For instance, the bones and teeth of mammals are far stronger and more durable than the mineral…
Soft composite solids are made of inclusions dispersed within soft matrices. They are ubiquitous in nature and form the basis of many biological tissues. In the field of materials science, synthetic soft composites are promising candidates…