Related papers: Nonlinear amplification of adhesion forces in inte…
Recently Guduru and coworkers have demonstrated with neat theory and experiments that both increase of strength and of toughness are possible in the contact of a rigid sphere with concentric single scale of waviness, against a very soft…
Friction is a ubiquitous phenomenon that greatly affects our everyday lives and is responsible for large amounts of energy loss in industrialised societies. Layered materials such as graphene have interesting frictional properties and are…
This article studies the fundamental problem of separating two adhesive elastic fibers based on numerical simulation employing a recently developed finite element model for molecular interactions between curved slender fibers. Specifically,…
Any macroscopic deformation of a filamentous bundle is necessarily accompanied by local sliding and/or stretching of the constituent filaments. Yet the nature of the sliding friction between two aligned filaments interacting through…
The most direct measurement of adhesion is the pull-off force, i.e. the tensile force necessary to separate two solids in contact. For a given interface, it depends on various experimental parameters, including separation speed, contact age…
Developing adhesives whose bond strength can be externally manipulated is a topic of considerable interest for practical and scientific purposes. In this work, we propose a method of controlling the adhesion force of a regular fluid, such…
In the present short note, we generalize simple approximate Johnson-Jaffar-Barber solutions for the indentation by a rigid punch of a thin elastic layer on a rigid foundation to the case of adhesion. This could be an interesting geometry…
Crumpled thin sheets are complex fractal structures whose physical properties are influenced by a hierarchy of ridges. In this Letter, we report experiments that measure the stress-strain relation and show the coexistence of phases in the…
As mechanical structures enter the nanoscale regime, the influence of van der Waals forces increases. Graphene is attractive for nanomechanical systems because its Young's modulus and strength are both intrinsically high, but the mechanical…
The problem of the detachment of a sufficiently large flat indenter from a plane adhesive viscoelastic strip of thickness "b" is studied. For any given retraction speed, three different detachment regimes are found: (i) for very small "b"…
We study the non-contact friction between an atomic force microscope tip and a metal substrate in the presence of bias voltage. The friction is due to energy losses in the sample created by the electromagnetic field from the oscillating…
The phenomenon of crumpling is common in our daily life and nature. It exhibits many interesting properties, such as ultra-tough resistance to pressure with less than 30$\%$ of volume density, power-law relation for pressure vs density, and…
The folding of paper, hide, and woven fabric has been used for millennia to achieve enhanced articulation, curvature, and visual appeal for intrinsically flat, two-dimensional materials. For graphene, an ideal two-dimensional material,…
We present a unique experimental configuration that allows us to determine the interfacial forces on nearly parallel plates made from the thinnest possible mechanical structures, single and few layer graphene membranes. Our approach…
Thermal welding of polymer-polymer interfaces is important for integrating polymeric elements into devices. When two different polymers are joined, the strength of the weld depends critically on the degree of immiscibility. We perform…
We consider the response of an adsorbed polymer that is pulled by an AFM within a simple geometric framework. We separately consider the cases of i) fixed polymer-surface contact point, ii) sticky case where the polymer is peeled off from…
Using high-resolution digital recordings, we study the crackling sound emitted from crumpled sheets of mylar as they are strained. These sheets possess many of the qualitative features of traditional disordered systems including frustration…
Soft yet tough materials are ubiquitous in nature and everyday life. The ratio between fracture toughness and intrinsic fracture energy of a soft material defines its toughness enhancement. Soft materials' toughness enhancement has been…
It is well-known that a thin sheet held in a rigid circular clamp has a larger flexural strength than when it is flat. Here, we report that the flexural strength of curved sheets is further increased with a softening of the clamping…
We report on a simulational study of the compression and buckling of elastic ridges formed by joining the boundary of a flat sheet to itself. Such ridges store energy anomalously: their resting energy scales as the linear size of the sheet…