Related papers: Universal features in "stickiness" criteria for so…
The elastic and adhesive properties of a solid surface can be quantified by indenting it with a rigid sphere. Indentation tests are classically described by the JKR-law when the solid is very stiff, while recent work highlights the…
Many biological systems can form strong adhesion to various materials with complex shapes. The adhesion is further switchable between strongly adhering and completely non-adhering in a simple and fast manner. By contrast, no engineering…
This work focuses on the bearing rigidity theory, namely the branch of knowledge investigating the structural properties necessary for multi-element systems to preserve the inter-units bearings when exposed to deformations. The original…
The foundation of continuum elasticity theory is based on two general principles: (i) the force felt by a small volume element from its surrounding acts only through its surface (the Cauchy principle, justified by the fact that interactions…
In this review we summarize theoretical progress in the field of active matter, placing it in the context of recent experiments. Our approach offers a unified framework for the mechanical and statistical properties of living matter:…
Thousands of plant and animal species have been observed to have superhydrophobic surfaces that lead to various novel behaviors [1-5]. These observations have inspired attempts to create artificial superhydrophobic surfaces, given such…
We develop a theory of static friction by modeling the homogeneous surfaces of contact as being composed of a regular array of compressible elastic smooth microscopic inclines. Static friction is thought of as the resistance due to having…
The physical properties of granular materials have been extensively studied in recent years. So far, however, there exists no theoretical framework which can explain the observations in a unified manner beyond the phenomenological jamming…
The viscoelastic properties of soft jammed solids, such as foams, emulsions, and soft colloids, have been the subject of experiments, with particular interest in the anomalous viscous loss. However, a microscopic theory to explain these…
With a novel 3D discrete-element method specially developed with adhesive contact mechanics, random loose packings of uniform spherical micron-sized particles are fully investigated. The results show that large velocity, large size or weak…
We calculate the induced elastic-interaction between pointwise membrane inclusions that locally interact up to quadratic order with the membrane curvature tensor. For isotropic inclusions, we recover the usual interaction proportional to…
In the context of elasticity theory, rigidity theorems allow to derive global properties of a deformation from local ones. This paper presents a new asymptotic version of rigidity, applicable to elastic bodies with sufficiently stiff…
As the interest in adhesion is shifting towards smaller and smaller scales, the well known Tabor adhesion parameter decreases and the DMT theory is frequently considered to be the appropriate limit. A very attractive much simplified version…
Soft materials such as rubbers, silicones, gels and biological tissues have a nonlinear response to large deformations, a phenomenon which in principle can be captured by hyperelastic models. The suitability of a candidate hyperelastic…
This work focuses on the thermodynamics of pseudo-elastic models which represent the Mullins effect. Two established models are analyzed theoretically, their thermomechanical properties are derived, and certain critical points are…
Solid contacts involving soft materials are important in mechanical engineering or biomechanics. Experimentally, such contacts have been shown to shrink significantly under shear, an effect which is usually explained using adhesion models.…
One of the essential questions in the area of granular matter is, how to obtain macroscopic tensorial quantities like stress and strain from ``microscopic'' quantities like the contact forces in a granular assembly. Different averaging…
An extensive experimental study of indentation and crack arrest statistics is presented for four different brittle materials (alumina, silicon carbide, silicon nitride, glass). Evidence is given that the crack length statistics can be…
In spite of the apparent similarity of micro-branching instabilities in different brittle materials, we propose that the physics determining the typical length- and time-scales characterizing the post-instability patterns differ greatly…
Adhesive contact between a thin elastic sheet and a substrate in a liquid environment arises in a range of biological, physical and technological applications. By considering the dynamics of this process that naturally couples fluid flow,…