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Stripe patterns are ubiquitous in nature and everyday life. While the synthesis of these patterns has been thoroughly studied in the literature, their potential to control the mechanics of structured materials remains largely unexplored. In…
The decomposition of large unitary matrices into smaller ones is important, because it provides ways to realization of classical and quantum information processing schemes. Today, most of the methods use planar meshes of tunable two-channel…
Fibre-reinforced hydrogels are promising materials for biomedical applications due to their strength, toughness, and tunability. However, it remains unclear how to design fibre-reinforced hydrogels for use in specific applications due to…
Experimentally measuring the elastic properties of thin biological surfaces is non-trivial, particularly when they are curved. One technique that may be used is the indentation of a thin sheet of material by a rigid indenter, whilst…
The technique presented here identifies tethered mould designs, optimised for growing cultured tissue with very highly-aligned cells. It is based on a microscopic biophysical model for polarised cellular hydrogels. There is an unmet need…
The deposition of a viscoplastic fluid onto a substrate can be achieved by simply moving apart two plates initially separated by a fluid filled gap, where the footprint shape depends on the initiation of a fingering instability. Here, we…
This paper presents a general, nonlinear isogeometric finite element formulation for rotation-free shells with embedded fibers that captures anisotropy in stretching, shearing, twisting and bending -- both in-plane and out-of-plane. These…
Materials exhibit geometric structures across mesoscopic to microscopic scales, influencing macroscale properties such as appearance, mechanical strength, and thermal behavior. Capturing and modeling these multiscale structures is…
When the elastic properties of structured materials become direction-dependent, the number of their descriptors increases. For example, in two-dimensions, the anisotropic behavior of materials is described by up to 6 independent elastic…
Many objects in nature and industry are wrapped in a thin sheet to enhance their chemical, mechanical, or optical properties. There are similarly a variety of methods for wrapping, from pressing a film onto a hard substrate, to using…
Shape morphing magnetic soft materials, composed of magnetic particles in a soft polymer matrix, can transform shapes reversibly, remotely, and rapidly, finding diverse applications in actuators, soft robotics, and biomedical devices. To…
Dynamic stencil deposition (DSD) techniques offer a variety of fabrication advantages not possible with traditional lithographic processing, such as the the ability to directly deposit nanostructures with programmable height profiles.…
Metamaterials are a new generation of advanced materials, exhibiting engineered microstructures that enable customized material properties not found in nature. The dynamics of metamaterials are particularly fascinating, promising the…
Biological cells are able to generate intricate structures and respond to external stimuli, sculpting their membrane from within. Simplified biomimetic systems can aid in understanding the principles which govern these shape changes and…
We propose a novel and flexible roof modeling approach that can be used for constructing planar 3D polygon roof meshes. Our method uses a graph structure to encode roof topology and enforces the roof validity by optimizing a simple but…
We investigate how thin structures change their shape in response to non-mechanical stimuli that can be interpreted as variations in the structure's natural curvature. Starting from the theory of non-Euclidean plates and shells, we derive…
We consider planar liquid crystal elastomers: two dimensional objects made of anisotropic responsive materials, that upon activation remain flat however change their planar shape. We derive a closed form, analytical solution based on the…
Major challenges of micro thermal machines are the thermal insulation and mechanical tolerance in the case of sliding piston. Switching from piston to membrane in microengines can alleviate the latest and lead to planar architectures.…
Designing anisotropic structured materials by reducing symmetry results in unique behaviors, such as shearing under uniaxial compression or tension. This direction-dependent coupled mechanical phenomenon is crucial for applications such as…
Photomechanically active materials undergo reversible deformation on illumination, making them ideal for remote, tether-free actuation. Much of the work on these materials has focused on one-dimensional structures, such as strips. In this…