Related papers: Stress Fluctuations in Transient Active Networks
Filamentous polymer networks govern the mechanical properties of many biological materials. Force distributions within these networks are typically highly inhomogeneous and, although the importance of force distributions for structural…
Living neuronal networks in dissociated neuronal cultures are widely known for their ability to generate highly robust spatiotemporal activity patterns in various experimental conditions. These include neuronal avalanches satisfying the…
The lifetime of a porous media, submitted to a constant subcritical stress, is studied by means of a numerical model. This model is based on a spring network where the porosity is represented by missing springs. The dynamics is produced…
We study the dynamics of a single semiflexible filament coupled to a Hookean spring at its boundary. The spring produces a fluctuating tensile force on the filament, whose value depends on the filament's instantaneous end-to-end length. The…
Here we numerically study a model of excitable media, namely, a network with occasionally quiet nodes and connection weights that vary with activity on a short-time scale. Even in the absence of stimuli, this exhibits unstable dynamics,…
Many natural materials exhibit highly complex, nonlinear, anisotropic, and heterogeneous mechanical properties. Recently, it has been demonstrated that data-driven strain energy functions possess the flexibility to capture the behavior of…
Topological defects are at the root of the large-scale organization of liquid crystals. In two-dimensional active nematics, two classes of topological defects of charges $\pm 1/2$ are known to play a major role due to active stresses.…
Materials such as foams, concentrated emulsions, dense suspensions or colloidal gels, are yield stress fluids. Their steady flow behavior, characterized by standard rheometric techniques, is usually modeled by a Herschel-Bulkley law. The…
Cells sense the geometry and stiffness of their adhesive environment by active contractility. For strong adhesion to flat substrates, two-dimensional contractile network models can be used to understand how force is distributed throughout…
The thesis investigates the flow of non-Newtonian fluids in porous media using pore-scale network modeling. Non-Newtonian fluids show very complex time and strain dependent behavior and may have initial yield stress. Their common feature is…
Activity-mediated unjamming of a confluent glassy system is crucial for several biological processes, such as embryogenesis and cancer metastasis. During these processes, the cells progressively change their junction properties,…
Flow behavior of a single-component yield stress fluid is addressed on the hydrodynamic level. A basic ingredient of the model is a coupling between fluctuations of density and velocity gradient via a Herschel-Bulkley-type constitutive…
We use Langevin dynamics simulations to study dynamical behaviour of a dense planar layer of active semi-flexible filaments. Using the strength of active force and the thermal persistence length as parameters, we map a detailed phase…
Biological membranes and vesicles play a central role in living systems, forming dynamic interfaces that regulate cellular organization and function. Classical descriptions of membrane mechanics that are rooted in equilibrium statistical…
The mechanical properties of the cell depend crucially on the tension of its cytoskeleton, a biopolymer network that is put under stress by active motor proteins. While the fibrous nature of the network is known to strongly affect the…
We analyze the probability distribution for entropy production rates of trajectories evolving on a class of out-of-equilibrium kinetic networks. These networks can serve as simple models for driven dynamical systems, which are of particular…
We study strain-controlled plastic deformation of crystalline solids via two-dimensional discrete dislocation dynamics simulations. To this end, we characterize the average stress-strain curves as well as the statistical properties of…
Tissues of living cells are a prime example of active fluids. There is experimental evidence that tissues generate extensile active stress even though their constituting cells are contractile. Fluctuating forces that could result from…
We investigate the hydrodynamic stability and the formation of patterns in a continuum model of epithelial layers, able to account for the interplay between mechanical activity, lateral adhesion and the $6-$fold orientational order…
The characterization of the "most connected" nodes in static or slowly evolving complex networks has helped in understanding and predicting the behavior of social, biological, and technological networked systems, including their robustness…