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Minimally invasive experimental methods that can measure local rate dependent mechanical properties are essential in understanding the behaviour of soft and biological materials in a wide range of applications. Needle based measurement…
Soft material research has seen significant growth in recent years, with emerging applications in robotics, electronics, and healthcare diagnostics where understanding material mechanical response is crucial for precision design.…
The low elastic modulus of soft materials, combined with geometric nonlinearity and rate dependence, presents significant challenges in the characterization of their mechanical response. We introduce a novel method for measuring the…
Compression stiffening, or an increase in shear modulus with increasing compressive strain, has been observed in recent rheometry experiments on brain, liver, and fat tissues. Here, we extend the known types of biomaterials exhibiting this…
Incremental stiffness characterizes the variation of a material's force response to a small deformation change. Typically materials have an incremental stiffness that is fixed and positive, but recent technologies, such as super-lenses, low…
We use 2D numerical simulations to study dense suspensions of non-Brownian hard particles using the Critical Load Model (CLM) under constant confining pressures. This simple model shows discontinuous shear thickening (DST) as the tangential…
Objective: Strain elastography and shear wave elastography are two commonly used methods to quantify cervical elasticity; however, they have limitations. Strain elastography is effective in showing tissue elasticity distribution in a single…
Flow in soft materials encompasses a wide range of viscous, plastic and elastic phenomena which provide challenges to modelling at the microscopic level. To create a controlled flow, we perform falling ball viscometry tests on packings of…
The mechanical properties of biological materials are spatially heterogeneous. Typical tissues are made up of a spanning fibrous extracellular matrix in which various inclusions, such as living cells, are embedded. While the influence of…
Soft polymer-based solid materials can be defined as solid materials with elastic moduli below 1 MPa. In order to obtain such a low modulus while retaining a solid character, all these materials are based on a network of fixed points…
We determine the linear viscoelastic response of jammed packings of athermal repulsive viscous spheres, a model for emulsions, wet foams, and soft colloidal suspensions. We numerically measure the complex shear modulus, a fundamental…
Building off recent advances on how to practically use exponential shear in a torsional rheometer to compute transient planar extensional viscosity (Kroo et al. 2025a), we extend the technique to cyclic tensile measurements in complex…
Viscosity is a fundamental property of liquid lubricants, yet it is challenging to determine accurately, especially at high pressures. Although equilibrium molecular dynamics (EMD) simulations are a promising alternative to…
This paper expounds the design and control of a new Variable Stiffness Series Elastic Actuator (VSSEA). It is established by employing a modular mechanical design approach that allows us to effectively optimise the stiffness modulation…
Viscous streaming is an efficient mechanism to exploit inertia at the microscale for flow control. While streaming from rigid features has been thoroughly investigated, when body compliance is involved, as in biological settings, little is…
Shear thickening, an increase of viscosity with shear rate, is a ubiquitous phenomena in suspended materials that has implications for broad technological applications. Controlling this thickening behavior remains a major challenge and has…
Vortex-induced vibration (VIV) test of a tensioned flexible pipe in oscillatory sheared flow was performed in an ocean basin. The model was 28.41 mm in diameter and 3.88 m in length. The test was performed on a rotating test rig to simulate…
An approximation of a system coupling the cross-diffusion of chemical species within a solvent, subjected to an electric field, is obtained through a control volume finite element (CVFE) scheme on general simplicial meshes in two or three…
Shear-wave elastography (SWE) measures shear-wave speed (SWS), which is related to the underlying shear modulus of soft tissue. SWE methods generally assume that soft tissue viscoelasticity is independent of mechanical loading, however,…
In-vivo tissue stiffness identification can be useful in pulmonary fibrosis diagnostics and minimally invasive tumor identification, among many other applications. In this work, we propose a palpation-based method for tissue stiffness…