Related papers: Curvature controlled pattern formation in floating…
Recent experimental observations have suggested that topological defects can facilitate the creation of sharp features in developing embryos. Whereas these observations echo established knowledge about the interplay between geometry and…
A collection of thin structures buckle, bend, and bump into each-other when confined. This contact can lead to the formation of patterns: hair will self-organize in curls; DNA strands will layer into cell nuclei; paper, when crumpled, will…
A two-dimensional or quasi-two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal refers to a surface confined system. When such a system is further confined by external line boundaries or excluded from internal line boundaries, the nematic directors form…
Patterning solid surfaces with varying wettability is important to manage droplets in microfluidics, heat transfer and printing. Solid surface roughness poses fundamental limitations including contact-line pinning and solid friction. Here,…
We study equilibrium shapes and shape transformations of a confined semiflexible chain inside a soft lipid tubule using simulations and continuum theories. The deformed tubular shapes and chain conformations depend on the relative magnitude…
Living organisms have mastered the dynamic control of internal stresses to perform an array of functions, such as change shape and locomote. State-of-the-art attempts to replicate this ability in synthetic materials are rudimentary in…
Active-elastic instabilities are common phenomena in the natural world which have the aspect of sudden mechanical morphings. Frequently, the driving force of the instability mechanisms has a chemo-mechanical nature which makes these kind of…
A flat sheet programmed with a planar pattern of spontaneous shape change will morph into a curved surface. Such metric mechanics is seen in growing biological sheets, and may be engineered in actuating soft matter sheets such as…
We investigate the relationship between pre-buckling and post-buckling states as a function of shell properties, within the deflation process of shells of an isotropic material. With an original and low-cost set-up that allows to measure…
We study the lubrication of fluid-immersed soft interfaces and show that elastic deformation couples tangential and normal forces and thus generates lift. We consider materials that deform easily, due to either geometry (e.g. a shell) or…
We introduce a family of boundary conditions and point constraints for conformal immersions that increase the controllability of surfaces defined as minimizers of conformal variational problems. Our free boundary conditions fix the metric…
Rivulets and droplets are naturally appearing shapes when small amounts of liquid are deposited on a partially wettable substrate. Here we study, by means of numerical simulations, the dewetting dynamics of a ring-rivulet on substrates with…
Inhomogeneities in deposition may lead to formation of rough surfaces, whose height fluctuations can be probed directly by scanning microscopy, or indirectly by scattering. Analytical or numerical treatments of simple growth models suggest…
As 2D materials such as graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, and 2D polymers become more prevalent, solution processing and colloidal-state properties are being exploited to create advanced and functional materials. However, our…
We explore flow of a completely wetting fluid in a funnel, with particular focus on contact line instabilities at the fluid front. While the flow in a funnel may be related to a number of other flow configurations as limiting cases,…
We model the formation and evolution of wrinkles in a floating elastic sheet under uniaxial compression. This is a canonical setup in the study of wrinkling, and whilst its static equilibrium configuration is well characterised, its…
Wrinkling is the phenomenon of out-of-plane deformation patterns in thin walled structures, as a result of a local compressive (internal) loads in combination with a large membrane stiffness and a small but non-zero bending stiffness.…
In this paper, we show that symmetries, which are known in the theory of integrable systems, naturally appeared in the classical linear theory of deformations of thin shells. Our result shows that if the middle surface of a shell becomes…
This paper addresses testing of compressed structures, such as shells, that exhibit catastrophic buckling and notorious imperfection sensitivity. The central concept is the probing of a loaded structural specimen by a controlled lateral…
This paper explores the fluid-elastic response of a cantilevered flexible sheet in the presence of uniform airflow. The leading edge of the sheet is clamped, while at the trailing edge, in-plane tension is applied to provide additional…