Related papers: Normal stresses in semiflexible polymer hydrogels
We explore the Mode I fracture toughness of a polymer gel containing a semi-infinite, growing crack. First, an expression is derived for the energy release rate within the linearized, small-strain setting. This expression reveals a crack…
In layered materials, a common mode of deformation involves buckling of the layers under tensile deformation in the direction perpendicular to the layers. The instability mechanism, which operates in elastic materials from geological to…
Active gels are a class of biologically-relevant material containing embedded agents that spontaneously generate forces acting on a sparse filament network. In vitro experiments of protein filaments and molecular motors have revealed a…
The Poynting effect generically manifests itself as the extension of the material in the direction perpendicular to an applied shear deformation (torsion) and is a material parameter hard to design. Unlike isotropic solids, in designed…
Based on the wormlike chain model, a coarse-grained description of the nonlinear dynamics of a weakly bending semiflexible polymer is developed. By means of a multiple scale perturbation analysis, a length-scale separation inherent to the…
We study the stress response to a step strain of covalently bonded gelatin gels in the temperature range where triple helix reversible crosslink formation is prohibited. We observe slow stress relaxation towards a $T$-dependent finite…
Microgels are elastic and deformable particles with a hybrid nature between that of polymers and colloids and unconventional behaviours with respect to hard colloids. We investigated the dynamics of a soft microgel made of interpenetrated…
Neural-network models have been employed to predict the instantaneous flow close to the wall in a viscoelastic turbulent channel flow. Numerical simulation data at the wall is utilized to predict the instantaneous velocity-fluctuations and…
The mechanics of cells is strongly affected by molecular motors that generate forces in the cellular cytoskeleton. We develop a model for cytoskeletal networks driven out of equilibrium by molecular motors exerting transient contractile…
Solutions of polymer chains are modelled using non-equilibrium Brownian dynamics simulations, with physically associative beads which form reversible crosslinks to establish a system-spanning physical gel network. Rheological properties…
Materials such as foams, concentrated emulsions, dense suspensions or colloidal gels, are yield stress fluids. Their steady flow behavior, characterized by standard rheometric techniques, is usually modeled by a Herschel-Bulkley law. The…
Colloidal gels are formed through the aggregation of attractive particles, whose size ranges from 10~nm to a few micrometers, suspended in a liquid. Such gels are ubiquitous in everyday life applications, from food products to paints or…
Active materials are media for which deformations can occur in absence of loads, given an external stimulus. Two approaches to the modeling of such materials are mainly used in literature, both based on the introduction of a new tensor: an…
Fibrous networks such as collagen are common in biological systems. Recent theoretical and experimental efforts have shed light on the mechanics of single component networks. Most real biopolymer networks, however, are composites made of…
Constitutive equations are developed for a polymer fluid, which is treated as a permanent network of strands bridged by junctions. The junctions are assumed to slide with respect to their reference positions under loading. Governing…
Rheometric measurements on assemblies of wet polystyrene bead assemblies, in steady uniform quasistatic shear flow, for varying liquid content within the small saturation (pendular) range of isolated liquid bridges, are supplemented with a…
We report on experimentally observed shear stress fluctuations in both granular solid and fluid states, showing that they are non-Gaussian at low shear rates, reflecting the predominance of correlated structures (force chains) in the…
A nonlinear dynamical system model that approximates a microscopic Gibbs field model for the yielding of a viscoplastic material subjected to varying external stress recently reported in [1] is presented. The predictions of the model are in…
We study the two-dimensional (2D) shear flow of amorphous solids within variants of an elastoplastic model, paying particular attention to spatial correlations and time fluctuations of, e.g., local stresses. The model is based on the local…
The intrinsic flexible character of polymeric materials also causes remarkable strain deformations along directions perpendicular to the applied stress. Here the biaxial response in the shear piezoelectricity of polyvinylidenefluoride…