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Soft particles such as microgels and core-shell particles can undergo significant and anisotropic deformations when adsorbed to a liquid interface. This, in turn, leads to a complex phase behavior upon compression. Here we develop a…
Conventional tissue engineering methodologies frequently depend on pharmacological strategies to induce or expedite tissue repair. However, bioengineered strategies incorporating biophysical stimulation have emerged as promising…
The microscopic structure of a plant cell wall is given by cellulose microfibrils embedded in a cell wall matrix. In this paper we consider a microscopic model for interactions between viscoelastic deformations of a plant cell wall and…
Scalable manufacturing of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) is essential for industrial-scale production of cell therapies and regenerative medicines. However, the 3D aggregate cultures used in manufacturing exhibit substantial…
We analyze the performance of a reduced-order simulation of geometric meta-materials based on zigzag patterns using a simplified representation. As geometric meta-materials we denote planar cellular structures which can be fabricated in 2d…
Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals can form new materials with tunable elastic and electro-optic properties. In a periodic `blue phase' host, particles should template into colloidal crystals with potential uses in photonics,…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
DNA nanostar (DNAns) hydrogels are promising materials for in vivo applications, including tissue regeneration and drug and antibody delivery. However, a systematic and quantitative understanding of the design principles controlling their…
Porous materials are relevant for a broad range of technologies from catalysis and filtration, to tissue engineering and lightweight structures. Controlling the porosity of these materials over multiple length scales often leads to enticing…
Elastic filaments are vital to biological, physical and engineering systems, from cilia driving fluid in the lungs to artificial swimmers and micro-robotics. Simulating slender structures requires intricate balance of elastic, body, active,…
The design of hydrogels that combine mechanical robustness with dynamic reconfigurability remains a fundamental challenge, as increasing crosslink dissociation rates compromise network integrity. This limitation is addressed through the…
Next-generation touch panels are poised to benefit from the use of stretchable and transparent soft ionic conductors, but these materials face several challenges in practical application, including structural damage, loss of functionality,…
Soft stretchable materials are key for arising technologies such as stretchable electronics or batteries, smart textiles, biomedical devices, tissue engineering and soft robotics. Recent attempts to design such materials, via e.g.…
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…
It is established that the mechanical properties of hydrogels control the fate of (stem) cells. However, despite its importance, a one-to-one correspondence between gels' stiffness and cell behaviour is still missing from literature. In…
We propose a highly coarse-grained simulation model for crystalline polymer solids with crystalline lamellar structures. The mechanical properties of a crystalline polymer solid are mainly determined by the crystalline lamellar structures.…
Active matter locally converts chemical energy into mechanical work and, for this reason, it provides new mechanisms of pattern formation. In particular, active gels made of protein motors and filaments are far-from-equilibrium systems that…
The processes taking place inside the living cell are now understood to the point where predictive computational models can be used to gain detailed understanding of important biological phenomena. A key challenge is to extrapolate this…
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…
With the increasing demand for personalized health monitoring, wearable sensors have gained attention in medical diagnostics and physiological tracking. Hydrogels, known for their mechanical properties and similarity to biological tissues,…