Related papers: Strand plasticity governs fatigue in colloidal gel…
Contacts between particles in dense, sheared suspensions are believed to underpin much of their rheology. Roughness and adhesion are known to constrain the relative motion of particles, and thus globally affect the shear response, but an…
Internally generated active stresses drive soft materials into architectures inaccessible to thermal self-assembly. We use a microtubule-based active fluid to assemble and irreversibly restructure actin-fascin networks. Subsequently, we…
In complex crystals close to melting or at finite temperatures, different types of defects are ubiquitous and their role becomes relevant in the mechanical response of these solids. Conventional elasticity theory fails to provide a…
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…
The ordering of particles in the drying process of a colloidal suspension is crucial in determining the properties of the resulting film. For example, microscopic inhomogeneities can lead to the formation of cracks and defects that can…
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…
The elastocapillary instability of a flexible plate plunged in a liquid bath is analysed theoretically. We show that the plate can bend due to two separate destabilizing mechanisms, when the liquid is partially wetting the solid. For…
One long-lasting puzzle in amorphous solids is shear localization, where local plastic deformation involves cooperative particle rearrangements in small regions of a few inter-particle distances, self-organizing into shear bands and…
The normal modes and relaxation rates of weak colloidal gels are investigated in computations employing different models of the hydrodynamic interactions between colloids. The eigenspectrum is computed for freely draining,…
Size-dependence of plastic flow is studied by discrete dislocation dynamical simulation of systems with various numbers of interacting linear edge dislocations while the stress is slowly increased. Regions between avalanches in the…
The strain load $\Delta\gamma$ that triggers consecutive avalanches is a key observable in the slow deformation of amorphous solids. Its temporally averaged value $\langle \Delta\gamma \rangle$ displays a non-trivial system-size dependence…
We pursue the study of fatigue accumulation in an oscillating elastoplastic beam under the additional hypothesis that the material can partially recover by the effect of melting. The full system consists of the momentum and energy balance…
Quasi-static tensile experiments were performed for a model disordered solid consisting of a two-dimensional raft of polydisperse floating granular particles with capillary attractions. The ductility is tuned by controlling the capillary…
We formulate a generic concept model for the deformation of a locally disordered, macroscopically homogeneous material which undergoes irreversible strain softening during plastic deformation. We investigate the influence of the degree of…
Identifying the necessary conditions for the onset of rigidity in a gel remains a challenge. It has been suggested that local particle coordination could be used to establish such conditions, but rigid gels occur for various coordination…
Amorphous solids relax via slow molecular rearrangement induced by thermal fluctuations or applied stress. Although microscopic structural signatures predicting these structural relaxations have long been sought, a physically motivated…
We study computationally the creep and yielding of athermal gels and fibre network materials under a constant imposed shear stress, within a minimal model of interconnected filaments with central forces in $d=2$ spatial dimensions. Each…
Colloidal gels have strong industrial relevance as they can behave liquid- and solid-like. The latter allows them to support the buoyant weight against gravity. However, the system is intrinsically out-of-equilibrium, which means that the…
We study the solid mechanical properties of several thixotropic suspensions as a function of the shear stress history applied during their flow stoppage and their aging in their solid state. We show that their elastic modulus and yield…
We investigate the dissipative mechanisms exhibited by creased material sheets when subjected to mechanical loading, which comes in the form of plasticity and relaxation phenomena within the creases. After demonstrating that plasticity…