Related papers: Negative energy elasticity in a rubberlike gel
An analysis of glass formation for polymer melts that are diluted by structured molecular additives is derived by using the generalized entropy theory, which involves a combination of the Adam-Gibbs model and the direct computation of the…
We propose a dynamical theory of low-temperature shear deformation in amorphous solids. Our analysis is based on molecular-dynamics simulations of a two-dimensional, two-component noncrystalline system. These numerical simulations reveal…
We present a pedagogical review of the swelling thermodynamics and phase transitions of polymer gels. In particular, we discuss how features of the volume phase transition of the gel's osmotic equilibrium is analogous to other transitions…
An analytic model of the shear modulus applicable at temperatures up to melt and at all densities is presented. It is based in part on a relation between the melting temperature and the shear modulus at melt. Experimental data on argon are…
Glasses feature a broad distribution of relaxation times and activation energies without an obvious characteristic scale. At the same time, macroscopic quantities such as Newtonian viscosity and nonlinear plastic deformation, are…
A nematic liquid-crystal gel is a macroscopically homogeneous elastic medium with the rotational symmetry of a nematic liquid crystal. In this paper, we develop a general approach to the study of these gels that incorporates all underlying…
Recent experiments showed that the shear modulus of solid 4He stiffens in the same temperature range (below 200 mK) where mass decoupling and supersolidity have been inferred from torsional oscillator measurements. The two phenomena are…
Strain-controlled isotropic compression gives rise to jammed packings of repulsive, frictionless disks with either positive or negative global shear moduli. We carry out computational studies to understand the contributions of the negative…
Using positional data from video-microscopy we determine the elastic moduli of two-dimensional colloidal crystals as a function of temperature. The moduli are extracted from the wave-vector-dependent normal mode spring constants in the…
Randomly crosslinked macromolecules undergo a liquid-to-amorphous solid phase transition at a critical crosslink concentration. This transition has two main signatures: the random localization of a fraction of the monomers and the emergence…
We report extensive numerical simulations of different models of 2D polymer rings with internal elasticity. We monitor the dynamical behavior of the rings as a function of the packing fraction, to address the effects of particle deformation…
Physically assembled gels have promising applications in many fields because of their tunable mechanical properties. Here, we report the mechanical properties as a function of polymer volume fraction ($\phi$) for a physical gel system…
While deeply supercooled liquids exhibit divergent viscosity and increasingly heterogeneous dynamics as the temperature drops, their structure shows only seemingly marginal changes. Understanding the nature of relaxation processes in this…
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…
We have developed a new technique to measure viscoelasticity in soft materials such as polymer solutions, by monitoring thermal fluctuations of embedded probe particles using laser interferometry in a microscope. Interferometry allows us to…
In this article, we study a thermodynamically consistent thermo-visco-elastic model describing the balance of internal energy in a heat-conducting inelastic body. In the considered problem, the temperature dependence appears in both the…
Polyelectrolyte gels are a very attractive class of actuation materials with remarkable electronic and mechanical properties with a great similarity to biological contractile tissues. They consist of a polymer network with ionizable groups…
It is shown that the elastic energy far from a point defect in an isotropic solid is mainly shear elastic energy. The calculation, which is based on a standard dipole expansion, shows that no matter how large or small the bulk modulus is…
In this paper we focus on the mechanical properties of oligomeric glasses (waxes), employing a microscopic model that provides, via numerical simulations, information about the shear modulus of such materials, the failure mechanism via…
We study theoretically and numerically the elastic properties of hard sphere glasses, and provide a real-space description of their mechanical stability. In contrast to repulsive particles at zero-temperature, we argue that the presence of…