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Despite a century of use, the mechanism of nanoparticle-driven mechanical reinforcement of elastomers is unresolved. A major hypothesis attributes it to glassy interparticle bridges, supported by an observed inversion of the variation of…
Across all scales of the physical world, dynamical systems can often be usefully represented as abstract networks that encode the system's units and inter-unit interactions. Understanding how physical rules shape the topological structure…
Disordered biopolymer gels have striking mechanical properties including strong nonlinearities. In the case of athermal gels (such as collagen-I) the nonlinearity has long been associated with a crossover from a bending dominated to a…
Deformations of amorphous polymer networks prepared with significant concentrations of liquid crystalline mesogens have been recently reported to undergo mechanotropic phase transitions. Here, we report that these mechanotropic phase…
Surface growth is a crucial component of many natural and artificial processes from cell proliferation to additive manufacturing. In elastic systems surface growth is usually accompanied by the development of geometrical incompatibility…
In this thesis the formation and properties of a polymer gel on and at a surface are investigated. The gel under investigation is defined as a three-dimensional network of "phantom" macromolecules that form permanent links with one another…
We introduce a coarse-grained stochastic network dynamics (CGSND) framework for modeling deformation and rupture in polymer networks. The method replaces explicit molecular dynamics (MD) or coarse-grained molecular dynamics (CGMD) with…
In this contribution, we present a new Materials Knowledge System framework for microstructure-sensitive predictions of effective stress--strain responses in composite materials. The model is developed for composites with a wide range of…
We introduce a model of proteins in which all of the key atoms in the protein backbone are accounted for, thus extending the Freely Rotating Chain model. We use average bond lengths and average angles from the Protein Databank as input…
The stretchability of polymeric materials is critical to many applications such as stretchable electronics and soft robotics, yet the stretchability of conventional cross-linked linear polymers is limited by the entanglements between…
Disordered elastic networks provide a framework for describing a wide variety of physical systems, ranging from amorphous solids, through polymeric fibrous materials to confluent cell tissues. In many cases, such networks feature two widely…
This work proposes a model for granular deformation that predicts the stress and velocity profiles in well-developed dense granular flows. Recent models for granular elasticity (Jiang and Liu 2003) and rate-sensitive plastic flow (Jop et…
Polymers in nonuniform flows undergo strong deformation, which in the presence of persistent stretching can result in the coil-stretch transition. This phenomenon has been characterized by using the formalism of nonequilibrium statistical…
Predicting the rheological behavior of associative polymers bridging colloidal particles into transient networks is fundamentally challenging because the coupled spatiotemporal scales prevent efficient molecular-fidelity modeling. We…
We study the partitioning of cosolute particles in a thin film of a semi-flexible polymer network by a combination of coarse-grained (implicit-solvent) stochastic dynamics simulations and mean-field theory. We focus on a wide range of…
This paper presents a macroscopic theory, alongside its numerical implementation, aimed at describing, explaining, and predicting the nucleation and propagation of fracture in viscoelastic materials subjected to quasistatic loading…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked elastomer networks with liquid crystal mesogens incorporated into the main or side chain. Polydomain liquid crystalline (nematic) elastomers exhibit unusual mechanical properties like soft…
The toughness of a polymer material can increase significantly if two networks are combined into one material. This toughening effect is a consequence of a transition from a brittle to a ductile failure response. Although this transition…
Polymer chains decorated with a fraction of monomers capable of forming reversible bonds form transient polymer networks that are important in soft and biological systems. If chains are flexible and the attractive monomers are all of the…
In this research study, a numerical tool, which is based on a version of Slender Body theory, has been used and also modified to simulate the mechanical behaviour of single- and double-cross-linked biopolymer networks (hydrogel) under…