Related papers: Root growth and force chains in a granular soil
Controlling the self-assembly of supramolecular structures is vital for living cells, and a central challenge for engineering at the nano- and microscales. Nevertheless, even particles without optimized shapes can robustly form well-defined…
The arrangements of particles and forces in granular materials have a complex organization on multiple spatial scales that ranges from local structures to mesoscale and system-wide ones. This multiscale organization can affect how a…
One of the central problems in animal and plant developmental biology is deciphering how chemical and mechanical signals interact within a tissue to produce organs of defined size, shape and function. Cell walls in plants impose a unique…
Creep mechanisms in uniaxially compressed 3D granular solids comprised of faceted frictionless grains are studied numerically using a constant pressure and constant stress simulation method. Rapid uniaxial compression followed by slow…
Soft robots, in contrast to their rigid counter parts, have infinite degrees of freedom that are coupled with their interaction with the environment. We consider the locomotion of an untethered robot, in the granular medium, comprised of…
Grain growth (GG), driven by grain boundary (GB) migration, is a fundamental mechanism of microstructural evolution in polycrystalline materials. GB migration is frequently accompanied by a relative shear displacement of grains meeting at…
The relative importance of the intrinsic and extrinsic factors determining the variety of geometric shapes exhibited by dendritic trees remains unclear. This question was addressed by developing a model of the growth of dendritic trees…
External magnetic fields influence the microstructure of polycrystalline materials. We explore the influence of strong external magnetic fields on the long time scaling of grain size during coarsening in thin films with an extended…
The anisotropy of wood within the radial-tangential (RT) growth plane has a major influence on the cracking behavior perpendicular to grain. Within the scope of this work, a two-dimensional discrete element model is developed, consisting of…
Farmed landscapes provide a natural laboratory to test how management reshapes near-surface hydrodynamics. Combining distributed acoustic sensing with physics-based hydromechanical modeling, we tracked minute-resolution, meter-scale changes…
Growth and folding in one-layered model tissue sheets are studied in a stochastic, lattice-free single cell model which considers the discrete cellular structure of the tissue, and a coarse grained analytical approach. The polarity of the…
One of the key characteristics of multicellular organisms is the ability to establish and maintain shapes, or morphologies, under a variety of physical and chemical perturbations. A quantitative description of the underlying morphological…
We visualize the formation of fingered flow in dry model sandy soils under different raining conditions using a quasi-2d experimental set-up, and systematically determine the impact of soil grain diameter and surface wetting property on…
Models at various levels of resolution are commonly used, both for forest management and in ecological research. They all have comparative advantages and disadvantages, making desirable a better understanding of the relationships between…
Nutation is an oscillatory movement that plants display during their development. Despite its ubiquity among plants movements, the relation between the observed movement and the underlying biological mechanisms remains unclear. Here we show…
Mechanical interactions among cells in a growing microbial colony can significantly influence the colony's spatial genetic structure and, thus, evolutionary outcomes such as the fates of rare mutations. Here, we computationally investigate…
Soil is a complex, dynamic material, with physical properties that depend on its biological content. We propose a cellular automaton model for self-organizing soil structure, where soil aggregates and serves as food for microbial species.…
We present a mechanical model of tissue homeostasis that is specialised to the intestinal crypt. Growth and deformation of the crypt, idealised as a line of cells on a substrate, are modelled using morphoelastic rod theory. Alternating…
A bonded particle model is used to explore how variations in the material properties of brittle, isotropic solids affect critical behavior in fragmentation. To control material properties, a new model is proposed which includes breakable…
A granular instability driven by gravity is studied experimentally and numerically. The instability arises as grains fall in a closed Hele-Shaw cell where a layer of dense granular material is positioned above a layer of air. The initially…