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The elasticity of PDMS has played a central role in advancing important microfluidic technologies, ranging from early valves to sophisticated organ-on-a-chip systems. However, most deformable microfluidic devices are based on geometries…
Lightweight, single-use explosion containment structures provide an effective solution for neutralizing rogue explosives, combining affordability with ease of transport. This paper introduces a three-stage simulation framework that captures…
Nematic elastomers and glasses are solids that display spontaneous distortion under external stimuli. Recent advances in the synthesis of sheets with controlled heterogeneities have enabled their actuation into non-trivial shapes with…
In this work, we focus on the family of shell formulations referred to as "solid shells", where the simulation of shell-type structures is performed by means of a mesh of 3D solid elements, with typically only one element through the…
Nature-inspired stochastic metamaterials with disordered and multiscale architectures have shown great promise towards extraordinary functionalities, including high mechanical resilience, stress modulation and biased stiffness…
Designing flat sheets that can be made to deform into 3D shapes is an area of intense research with applications in micromachines, soft robotics, and medical implants. Thus far, such sheets were designed to adopt a single target shape.…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) can undergo large reversible contractions along their nematic director upon heating or illumination. A spatially patterned director within a flat LCE sheet thus encodes a pattern of contraction on heating,…
Incremental stiffness characterizes the variation of a material's force response to a small deformation change. Typically materials have an incremental stiffness that is fixed and positive, but recent technologies, such as super-lenses, low…
Liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) are shape-changing materials that exhibit large deformations in response to applied stimuli. Local control of the orientation of LCEs spatially directs the deformation of these materials to realize…
Liquid crystal elastomers represent a novel class of programmable shape-transforming materials whose shape change trajectory is encoded in the material's nematic director field. Using three-dimensional nonlinear finite element…
We develop three inverse elastic scattering schemes for locating multiple small, extended and multiscale rigid bodies, respectively. There are some salient and promising features of the proposed methods. The cores of those schemes are…
Micropatterning techniques have become an important tool for the study of cell behavior in controlled microenvironments. As a consequence, several approaches for the creation of micropatterns have been developed in recent years. However,…
Soft materials capable of large inelastic deformation play an essential role in high-performance nacre-inspired architectured materials with a combination of stiffness, strength and toughness. The rigid "building blocks" made from glass or…
Wrinkling is the phenomenon of out-of-plane deformation patterns in thin walled structures, as a result of a local compressive (internal) loads in combination with a large membrane stiffness and a small but non-zero bending stiffness.…
The ability to engineer complex three-dimensional shapes from planar sheets with precise, programmable control underpins emerging technologies in soft robotics, reconfigurable devices, and functional materials. Here, we present a…
Mechanical metamaterials capable of large deformations are an emerging platform for functional devices and structures across scales. Bistable designs are particularly attractive since they endow a single object with two configurations that…
Entangled networks are fundamental in various systems, from biological structures to engineered materials. Current techniques for programming entanglement often rely on intricate chemistry or result in statistically homogeneous networks,…
Thin elastic films can spontaneously attach to liquid interfaces, offering a platform for tailoring their physical, chemical, and optical properties. Current understanding of the elastocapillarity of thin films is based primarily on studies…
We study the snapping instability of a spherical elastic shell induced by a viscous flow, the umbrella flipping problem when life is at low Reynolds numbers. We combine precision desktop-scale experiments, fluid-structure simulations, shell…
Thin-walled structures clamped by friction joints, such as aircraft skin panels are exposed to bending-stretching coupling and frictional contact. We propose an original sub-structuring approach, where the system is divided into thin-walled…