Related papers: Harnessing elasticity to generate self-oscillation…
A rectangular plate of dielectric elastomer exhibiting gradients of material properties through its thickness will deform inhomogeneously when a potential difference is applied to compliant electrodes on its major surfaces, because each…
A highly deformable rod, modelled as the extensible elastica, is connected to a movable clamp at one end and to a pin sliding along a frictionless curved profile at the other. Bifurcation analysis shows that axial compliance provides a…
Hydrodynamic instabilities often cause spatio-temporal pattern formations and transitions between them. We investigate a model experimental system, a density oscillator, where the bifurcation from a resting state to an oscillatory state is…
Soft materials, such as liquids, polymers, foams, gels, colloids, granular materials, and most soft biological materials, play an important role in our daily lives. From a mechanical viewpoint, soft materials can easily achieve large…
An elastic rod, straight in its undeformed state, has a mass attached at one end and a variable length, due to a constraint at the other end by a frictionless sliding sleeve. The constraint is arranged with the sliding direction parallel to…
Eccentric Keplerian discs are believed to be unstable to three-dimensional hydrodynamical instabilities driven by the time-dependence of fluid properties around an orbit. These instabilities could lead to small-scale turbulence, and…
Stationary whirling of slender and homogeneous (continuous) elastic shafts rotating around their axis, with pin-pin boundary condition at the ends, is revisited by considering the complete deformations in the cross section of the shaft. The…
Autonomous locomotion is a ubiquitous phenomenon in biology and in physics of active systems at microscopic scale. This includes prokaryotic, eukaryotic cells (crawling and swimming) and artificial swimmers. An outstanding feature is the…
Helical ribbons arise in many biological and engineered systems, often driven by anisotropic surface stress, residual strain, and geometric or elastic mismatch between layers of a laminated composite. A full mathematical analysis is…
Inspired by recent experimental observations of a harmonically excited elastic foil hovering near a wall while supporting substantial weight, we develop a theoretical framework that describes the underlying physical effects. Using…
Hopf bifurcations are a universal route to self-sustained oscillations in driven systems. Despite the absence of any singular stationary state, we show that time-averaged observables generically exhibit singularities at the onset of…
For an elastic system that is non-conservative but autonomous, subjected for example to time-independent loading by a steadily flowing fluid (air or water), a dangerous bifurcation, such as a sub-critical bifurcation, or a cyclic fold, will…
We have found a way for penetrating the space of the dynamical systems towards systems of arbitrary dimension exhibiting the nonlinear mixing of a large number of oscillation modes through which extraordinarily complex time evolutions…
Local bifurcation control is a topic of fundamental importance in the field of nonlinear dynamical systems. We discuss an original example within the context of storage-ring free-electron laser physics by presenting a new model that enables…
When two fluids of different electrical conductivities are transported side by side in a microfluidic device under the influence of an electric field, an electrokinetic instability (EKI) is often generated after some critical values of the…
We consider a model proposed by one of the authors for a type of plastic instability found in creep experiments which reproduces a number of experimentally observed features. The model consists of three coupled non-linear differential…
The equilibrium state of a flexible fiber settling in a viscous fluid is examined using a combination of macroscopic experiments, numerical simulations and scaling arguments. We identify three regimes having different signatures on this…
The motion of an object within a viscous fluid and in the vicinity of a soft surface induces a hydrodynamic stress field that deforms the latter, thus modifying the boundary conditions of the flow. This results in elastohydrodynamic (EHD)…
The Leidenfrost effect occurs when an object near a hot surface vaporizes rapidly enough to lift itself up and hover. Although well-understood for liquids and stiff sublimable solids, nothing is known about the effect with materials whose…
This work investigates the emergence of oscillations in one of the simplest cellular signaling networks exhibiting oscillations, namely, the dual-site phosphorylation and dephosphorylation network (futile cycle), in which the mechanism for…