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Conjugated polymer fibers can be used to manufacture various soft fibrous optoelectronic devices, significantly advancing wearable devices and smart textiles. Recently, conjugated polymer-based fibrous electronic devices have been widely…
Crumpled sheets have a surprisingly large resistance to further compression. We have studied the crumpling of thin sheets of Mylar under different loading conditions. When placed under a fixed compressive force, the size of a crumpled…
Open-cell graphitic foams were fabricated by chemical vapor deposition using nickel templates and their compressive responses were measured over a range of relative densities. The mechanical response required an interpretation in terms of a…
We analyze the structural behavior of a single polymer chain grafted to an attractive, flexible surface. Our model is composed of a coarse-grained bead-and-spring polymer and a tethered membrane. By means of extensive parallel tempering…
Using molecular dynamics simulations we examine the dynamics of a family of model polymers with varying chain length and torsional potential barriers. We focus on features of the dynamics of polymers that are seen experimentally but absent…
The mechanical response of interpenetrating phase composites (IPCs) with stochastic spinodal topologies is investigated experimentally and numerically. Model polymeric systems are fabricated by Polyjet multi-material printing, with the…
The equilibrium properties of polymer droplets on a soft deformable surface are investigated by molecular dynamics simulations of a bead-spring model. The surface consists of a polymer brush with irreversibly end-tethered linear homopolymer…
Granular matter takes many paths to pack. Gentle compression, compaction or repetitive tapping can happen in natural and industrial processes. The path influences the packing microstructure, and thus macroscale properties, particularly for…
Using a coarse-grained bead-spring model for semi-flexible macromolecules forming a polymer brush, structure and dynamics of the polymers is investigated, varying chain stiffness and grafting density. The anchoring condition for the grafted…
We study experimentally the impact on rigid surfaces of different soft porous solids saturated with liquid: hydrogel balls and liquid-saturated foam balls. The static con tact of such soft solids with the substrate is well described by…
Inter-surface forces mediated by polymer films are important in a range of technological and industrial situations. In cosmetics, applications such as hair conditioning typically rely on the adsorption of polyelectrolyte films onto the…
Understanding surface mechanics of soft solids, such as soft polymeric gels, is crucial in many engineering processes, such as dynamic wetting and adhesive failure. In these situations, a combination of capillary and elastic forces drives…
Two series of uniaxial tensile tests are performed on isotactic polypropylene with the strain rates ranging from 5 to 200 mm/min. In the first series, injection-molded specimens are used without thermal pre-treatment, whereas in the other…
Loops undergoing thermal fluctuations are prevalent in nature. Ring-like or cross-linked polymers, cyclic macromolecules, and protein-mediated DNA loops all belong to this category. Stability of these molecules are generally described in…
Polymer blends consisting of two or more polymers are important for a wide variety of industries and processes, but, the precise mechanism of their thermomechanical behaviour is incompletely understood. In order to understand clearly, it is…
Structures with artificial mechanical properties, often called mechanical metamaterials, exhibit divergent yet tunable performance. Various types of mechanical metamaterials have been proposed, which harness light or magnetic interactions,…
We study the dependence of the fracture surface energy on the pulling velocity for nano-porous polypropylene (PP) sheets to find two components: the static and dynamic ones. We show that these terms can be interpreted respectively as…
The structure of flexible polymers endgrafted in cylindrical pores of diameter D is studied as a function of chain length N and grafting density \sigma, assuming good solvent conditions. A phenomenological scaling theory, describing the…
We study the structural and dynamical mechanisms of reinforcement of a polymer nanocomposite (PNC) via coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. In a regime of strong polymer-filler interactions, the stress at failure of the PNC is…
Composites are ideally suited to achieve desirable multifunctional effective properties since the best properties of different materials can be judiciously combined with designed microstructures. Here we establish cross-property relations…