Related papers: Rate-dependent drag instability in granular materi…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
Picking up, laying down, colliding, rolling, and peeling are partial-contact interactions involving moving discontinuities. We examine the balances of momentum and energy across a moving discontinuity in a string, with allowance for…
Over the past few decades, oscillating flexible foils have been used to study the physics of organismal propulsion in different fluid environments. Here we extend this work to a study of flexible foils in a frictional environment. When the…
The fragmentation of small, brittle, flexible, inextensible fibers is investigated in a fully-developed, homogeneous, isotropic turbulent flow. Such small fibers spend most of their time fully stretched and their dynamics follows that of…
Experimental measurements of the response of a two dimensional system of plastic beads subjected to steady shear are reported. The beads float at the surface of a fluid substrate and are subjected to a slow, steady-shear in a Couette…
We study the dynamics of cracks in brittle materials when the velocity of the crack is comparable to the sound velocity by means of lattice simulations. Inertial and damped dynamics are analyzed. It is shown that dissipation strongly…
It is shown that a compound elastic structure, which displays a dynamic instability, may be designed as the union (or 'fusion') of two structures which are stable when separately analyzed. The compound elastic structure has two degrees of…
We study how the loading rate, specimen geometry and microstructural texture select the dynamics of a crack moving through an heterogeneous elastic material in the quasi-static approximation. We find a transition, fully controlled by two…
We analyse the flow curves of a two-dimensional assembly of granular particles which are interacting via frictional contact forces. For packing fractions slightly below jamming, the fluid undergoes a large scale instability, implying a…
We experimentally investigate the steady states of two granular assemblies differing in their material properties and allowed to exchange volume with each other under external agitation in the vicinity of their jamming transition. We…
The flow of granular material in a rotating cylinder was simulated by molecular dynamics in two dimensions using spherical as well as nonspherical grains. At very low but constant angular velocity we found that the flow varies irregularly…
The modeling of the elastic properties of disordered or nanoscale solids requires the foundations of the theory of elasticity to be revisited, as one explores scales at which this theory may no longer hold. The only cases for which…
Our previous numerical simulation [C.-E. Tsai et al., Physical Review Research \textbf{6}, 023065 (2024)] has shown that, for soft granular particles under quasistatic shearing, incorporating a speed-dependent friction is essential to…
Soft materials are ubiquitous in technological applications that require deformability, for instance, in flexible, water-repellent coatings. However, the wetting properties of pre-strained soft materials are only beginning to be explored.…
Unlike macroscopic multistable mechanical systems such as snap bracelets or elastic shells that must be physically manipulated into various conformations, microscopic systems can undergo spontaneous conformation switching between…
A polycrystalline solid is modelled as an ensemble of random irregular polyhedra filling the entire space occupied by the solid body, leaving no voids or flaws between them. Adjacent grains can slide with a relative velocity proportional to…
Passive mechanical response of skeletal muscles at fast time scales is dominated by long range interactions inducing cooperative behavior without breaking the detailed balance. This leads to such unusual "material properties" as negative…
We investigate the frictional force arising from quantum fluctuations when two dissipative metallic plates are set in a shear motion. While early studies showed that the electromagnetic fields in the quantum friction setup reach…
It was discovered recently that frictional granular materials can exhibit an important mechanism for instabilities, i.e the appearance of pairs of complex eigenvalues in their stability matrix. The consequence is an oscillatory exponential…
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…