Related papers: Self-stresses control stiffness and stability in o…
Prestress in amorphous solids bears the memory of their formation, and plays a profound role in their mechanical properties, from stiffening or softening elastic moduli to shifting frequencies of vibrational modes, as well as directing…
Tuning of active prestress e.g. through activity of molecular motors constitutes a powerful cellular tool to adjust cellular stiffness through nonlinear material properties. Understanding this tool is an important prerequisite for our…
The mechanics of disordered fibrous networks such as those that make up the extracellular matrix are strongly dependent on the local connectivity or coordination number. For biopolymer networks this coordination number is typically between…
States of self stress, organizations of internal forces in many-body systems that are in equilibrium with an absence of external forces, can be thought of as the constitutive building blocks of the elastic response of a material. In…
Collagen is the main structural and load-bearing element of various connective tissues, where it forms the extracellular matrix that supports cells. It has long been known that collagenous tissues exhibit a highly nonlinear stress-strain…
The paper presents a methodology for the enhanced stiffness analysis of parallel manipulators with internal preloading in passive joints. It also takes into account influence of the external loading and allows computing both the non-linear…
Unlike classical elasticity, where stresses arise from deformations relative to a stress-free reference configuration, rigidity in amorphous systems is maintained by disordered force networks that generate internal prestress. Previously, we…
Disordered spring networks are a useful paradigm to examine macroscopic mechanical properties of amorphous materials. Here, we study the elastic behavior of under-constrained spring networks, i.e.\ networks with more degrees of freedom than…
By applying effective medium-style calculations to random spring networks, we demonstrate that internal stresses fundamentally alter the nature of the rigidity transition in disordered materials, changing it from continuous to first-order…
Disordered filamentous networks with compliant crosslinks exhibit a low linear elastic shear modulus at small strains, but stiffen dramatically at high strains. Experiments have shown that the elastic modulus can increase by up to three…
Disordered spring networks that are undercoordinated may abruptly rigidify when sufficient strain is applied. Since the deformation in response to applied strain does not change the generic quantifiers of network architecture - the number…
Analytical and numerical calculations are presented for the mechanical response of fiber networks in a state of axisymmetric prestress, in the limit where geometric non-linearities such as fiber rotation are negligible. This allows us to…
Elastic structures can be designed to exhibit precise, complex, and exotic functions. While recent work has focused on the quasistatic limit governed by force balance, the mechanics at a finite driving rate are governed by Newton's…
Athermal models of disordered fibrous networks are highly useful for studying the mechanics of elastic networks composed of stiff biopolymers. The underlying network architecture is a key aspect that can affect the elastic properties of…
Cells and tissues change shape both to carry out their function and during pathology. In most cases, these deformations are driven from within the systems themselves. This is permitted by a range of molecular actors, such as active…
The non-linear stress-strain relation for crosslinked polymer networks is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. Previously we demonstrated the importance of trapped entanglements in determining the elastic and relaxational…
To assess the role of single-chain elasticity, non-affine strain fields and pre-stressed reference states we present and discuss the results of numerical and analytical analyses of modified 8-chain Arruda-Boyce model for cross-linked…
Amorphous particulate matter constitutes a wide range of natural and synthetic materials. Despite this ubiquity, the way in which these systems' disordered microstructure couples to their often subtle and complex dynamical behavior is not…
Stress-strain curves, or more generally, stress functions, are an extremely important characterization of a material's mechanical properties. However, stress functions are often difficult to derive and are narrowly tailored to a specific…
Evaluating the mechanical response of fiber-reinforced composites can be extremely time consuming and expensive. Machine learning (ML) techniques offer a means for faster predictions via models trained on existing input-output pairs and…