Related papers: The mechanical response of cellular materials with…
Numerical simulations of thin sheets undergoing large deformations are computationally challenging. Depending on the scenario, they may spontaneously buckle, wrinkle, fold, or crumple. Nature's thin tissues often experience significant…
The topology of an object describes global properties that are insensitive to local perturbations. Classic examples include string knots and the genus (number of handles) of a surface: no manipulation of a closed string short of cutting it…
Spinodoid architected materials have drawn significant attention due to their unique nature in stochasticity, aperiodicity, and bi-continuity. Compared to classic periodic truss-, beam- and plate-based lattice architectures, spinodoids are…
Structural cellular materials in nature, such as wood, trabecular bone, corals, and dentin combine complex biological functions with structural roles, such as skeletal support and impact protection1,2. They feature complex structural…
Shells, i.e., objects made of a thin layer of material following a surface, are among the most common structures in use. They are highly efficient, in terms of material required to maintain strength, but also prone to deformation and…
The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…
Soft particulate gels include materials we can eat, squeeze, or 3D print. From foods to bio-inks to cement hydrates, these gels are composed of a small amount of particulate matter (proteins, polymers, colloidal particles, or agglomerates…
Different cell types aggregate and sort into hierarchical architectures during the formation of animal tissues. The resulting spatial organization depends (in part) on the strength of adhesion of one cell type to itself relative to other…
Epithelial monolayers are a central building block of complex organisms. Topological defects have emerged as important elements for single cell behavior in flat epithelia. Here we theoretically study such defects in a three-dimensional…
We present a phenomenological treatment of diffusion-driven martensitic phase transformations in multi-component crystalline solids that arise from non-convex free energies in mechanical and chemical variables. The treatment describes…
The fields of mechanobiology and biomechanics are expanding our understanding of the complex behavior of soft biological tissues across multiple scales. Given the intricate connection between tissue microstructure and its macroscale…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
Cellular solids and micro-lattices are a class of lightweight architected materials that have been established for their unique mechanical, thermal, and acoustic properties. It has been shown that by tuning material architecture, a…
The present work presents a density-functional microscopic model of soft biological tissue. The model was based on a prototype molecular structure from experimentally resolved collagen peptide residues and water clusters and has the…
Colloidal dispersions are prized as model systems to understand basic properties of materials, and are central to a wide range of industries from cosmetics to foods to agrichemicals. Among the key developments in using colloids to address…
We present a framework for characterizing higher-order topological phases directly from the one-particle density matrix, without any reference to an underlying Hamiltonian. Our approach extends the mode-shell correspondence, originally…
Topological invariants have proved useful for analyzing emergent function as they characterize a property of the entire system, and are insensitive to local details, disorder, and noise. They support boundary states, which reduce the system…
Mechanical metamaterials are periodic lattice structures with complex unit cell architectures that can achieve extraordinary mechanical properties beyond the capability of bulk materials. A new class of metamaterials is proposed, whose…
This study examines the mechanical behavior of a novel class of mechanical metamaterials alternating pentamode lattices and stiffening plates. The unit cell of such lattices consists of a sub-lattice of the face cubic-centered unit cell…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…