Related papers: Twist-induced snapping in a bent elastic ribbon
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
The behaviour of elastic structures undergoing large deformations is the result of the competition between confining conditions, self-avoidance and elasticity. This combination of multiple phenomena creates a geometrical frustration that…
Knitted fabrics are two-dimensional-like structures formed by stitching one-dimensional yarn into three-dimensional curves. Plain stitch or stockinette stitch, one of the most fundamental knitting stitches, consists of periodic lattices of…
We study the emergence of helical structures subjected to a stretching force, demonstrating that the force transforms disk-shaped colloidal membranes into twisted chiral ribbons of predetermined handedness. Using an experimental technique…
We examine the focusing of kinetic energy and the amplification of various quantities during the snapping motion of the free end of a flexible structure. This brief but violent event appears to be a regularized finite-time singularity, with…
Robot grasping is subject to an inherent tradeoff: Grippers with a large span typically take a longer time to close, and fast grippers usually cover a small span. However, many practical applications of soft grippers require the ability to…
The morphology of an elastic strip subject to vertical compressive stress on a frictional rigid substrate is investigated by a combination of theory and experiment. We find a rich variety of morphologies, which -when the bending elasticity…
Twisting is a novel technique for creating strongly correlated effects in two-dimensional bilayered materials, and can tunably generate nontrivial topological properties, magnetism, and superconductivity. Magnetism is particularly…
Initially straight slender elastic rods with geometrically constrained ends buckle and form stable two-dimensional shapes when compressed by bringing the ends together. It is also known that beyond a critical value of the pre-stress,…
We investigate the statistical mechanics of long developable ribbons of finite width and very small thickness. The constraint of isometric deformations in these ribbon-like structures that follows from the geometric separation of scales…
It is shown that a compound elastic structure, which displays a dynamic instability, may be designed as the union (or 'fusion') of two structures which are stable when separately analyzed. The compound elastic structure has two degrees of…
Soft elastic filaments that can be stretched, bent and twisted exhibit a range of topologically and geometrically complex morphologies that include plectonemes, solenoids, knot-like and braid-like structures. We combine numerical…
This paper presents a new method for modelling the dynamic behaviour of developable ribbons, two dimensional strips with much smaller width than length. Instead of approximating such surface with a general triangle mesh, we characterize it…
We investigate with experiments the twist induced transverse buckling instabilities of an elastic sheet of length $L$, width $W$, and thickness $t$, that is clamped at two opposite ends while held under a tension $T$. Above a critical…
Confined thin structures are ubiquitous in nature. Spatial and length constraints have led to a number of novel packing strategies at both the micro-scale, as when DNA packages inside a capsid, and the macro-scale, seen in plant root…
Scanning tunneling microscopy experiments have revealed an spontaneous rippled-to-buckled transition in heated graphene sheets, in absence of any mechanical load. Several models relying on a simplified picture of the interaction between…
The effects of thermal fluctuations on the morphology of two-dimensional materials are hard to harness. We propose that a geometrically constrained graphene nanoribbon (GNR) can exhibit thermally activated snap-through transitions with a…
A symmetrically-buckled arch whose boundaries are clamped at an angle has two stable equilibria: an inverted and a natural state. When the distance between the clamps is increased (i.e. the confinement is decreased) the system snaps from…
We study the onset of spontaneous dynamics in the follower force model of an active filament, wherein a slender elastic filament in a viscous liquid is clamped normal to a wall at one end and subjected to a tangential compressive force at…
We show that gated bilayer graphene zigzag ribbons possess a fast and a slow edge, characterized by edge state velocities that differ due to non-negligible next-nearest-neighbor hopping elements. By applying bosonization and renormalization…