Related papers: The machine is the material: Structures that mimic…

Memory is often defined as the mental capacity of retaining information about facts, events, procedures and more generally about any type of previous experience. Memories are remembered as long as they influence our thoughts, feelings, and…

Hyperuniform materials, characterized by their suppressed density fluctuations and vanishing structure factors as the wave number approaches zero, represent a unique state of matter that straddles the boundary between order and randomness.…

Mechanical meta-materials are solids whose geometric structure results in exotic nonlinear behaviors that are not typically achievable via homogeneous materials. We show how to drastically expand the design space of a class of mechanical…

Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental aspects of many living and engineering systems. Here, the scale of biological agents covers a wide range, from nanomotors, cytoskeleton, and cells, to insects, fish, birds, and people. Inspired…

We consider problems of dynamic viscoelasticity taking into account the coupling of elastic and thermal fields. Efficient approximate models are developed and computational results on thermomechanical behaviour of shape-memory-alloy…

Shape memory polymers (SMPs) are materials with a great potential for future use in smart materials and structures. When heated from cold state (below the transformation temperature, which can either be the glass transition temperature or…

The design of desired behaviors in mechanical metamaterials has produced remarkable advances but has generally neglected two aspects - the inevitable presence of undesired behaviors and the role of dynamics in avoiding such behaviors.…

Active metamaterials are engineered structures that possess novel properties that can be changed after the point of manufacture. Their novel properties arise predominantly from their physical structure, as opposed to their chemical…

A buckled sheet offers a reservoir of material that can be unfurled at a later time. For sufficiently thin yet stiff materials, this geometric process has a striking mechanical feature: when the slack runs out, the material locks to further…

There has been significant recent interest in the mechanics community to design structures that can either violate reciprocity, or exhibit elastic asymmetry or odd elasticity. While these properties are highly desirable to enable mechanical…

We investigate how material rigidity acts as a key control parameter for the failure of solids under stress. In both experiments and simulations, we demonstrate that material failure can be continuously tuned by varying the underlying…

High-throughput computational and experimental design of materials aided by machine learning have become an increasingly important field in material science. This area of research has emerged in leaps and bounds in the thermal sciences, in…

Replicating the computational functionalities and performances of the brain remains one of the biggest challenges for the future of information and communication technologies. Such an ambitious goal requires research efforts from the…

Shape-programmable soft materials that exhibit integrated multifunctional shape manipulations, including reprogrammable, untethered, fast, and reversible shape transformation and locking, are highly desirable for a plethora of applications,…

Machines enabled the Industrial Revolution and are central to modern technological progress: A machine's parts transmit forces, motion, and energy to one another in a predetermined manner. Today's engineering frontier, building artificial…

Because of its nonequilibrium character, active matter in a steady state can drive engines that autonomously deliver work against a constant mechanical force or torque. As a generic model for such an engine, we consider systems that contain…

The mechanical behavior of disordered materials such as dense suspensions, glasses or granular materials depends on their thermal and mechanical past. Here we report the memory behavior of a quenched mesoscopic elasto-plastic (QMEP) model.…

We study microscopic engines that use a single active particle as their "working medium". Part of the energy required to drive the directed motion of the particle can be recovered as work, even at constant temperature. A wide class of…

In equilibrium, the physical properties of matter are set by the interactions between the constituents. In contrast, the energy input of the individual components controls the behavior of synthetic or living active matter. Great progress…

With the increasing interplay between experimental and computational approaches at multiple length scales, new research directions are emerging in materials science and computational mechanics. Such cooperative interactions find many…