Related papers: Biominerals with Texture Gradients are Functionall…
The hardest materials in living organisms are biologically grown crystalline minerals, or biominerals, which are also incredibly fracture-tough. Biomineral mesostructure includes size, shape, spatial arrangement, and crystal orientation of…
Spatial ordering of matter elicits exotic properties sometimes absent from a material's constituents. A few highly mineralised natural materials achieve high toughness through delocalised damage, whereas synthetic particulate composites…
Achieving an optimal biomechanical environment within bone scaffolds is critical for promoting tissue regeneration, particularly in load-bearing anatomical sites where rigid fixation can induce stress shielding and compromise healing.…
Granular crystallisation is an important phenomenon whereby ordered packing structures form in granular matter under vibration. However, compared with the well-developed principles of crystallisation at the atomic scale, crystallisation in…
The mechanical properties of crystalline materials can be substantially modified under confinement. Such modified macroscopic properties are usually governed by the altered microstructures and internal stress fields. Here, we use a parallel…
Many crystals in nature exhibit fascinating mechanical, optical, magnetic and other characteristics. One of the reasons for this phenomenon has to do with the presence of specific organic molecules that are tightly associated with the…
The architectures of biological hard materials reveal finely tailored complex assemblies of mineral crystals. Numerous recent studies associate the design of these local assemblies with impressive macroscopic response. Reproducing such…
The development of residual strains within a material is a valuable engineering technique for increasing the material's strength and toughness. Residual strains occur naturally in some biominerals and are an important feature that has…
While biological crystallization processes have been studied on the microscale extensively, models addressing the mesoscale aspects of such phenomena are rare. In this work, we investigate whether the phase-field theory developed in…
The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…
High strength and high toughness are usually mutually exclusive in engineering materials. Improving the toughness of strong but brittle materials like ceramics thus relies on the introduction of a metallic or polymeric ductile phase to…
During development, organisms acquire three-dimensional shapes with important physiological consequences. While the basic mechanisms underlying morphogenesis are known in eukaryotes, it is often difficult to manipulate them in vivo. To…
Shear localization in slowly-driven bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) is typically accompanied by a sharp drop in the bulk stress response as a signature of the plastic yielding transition. It is also observed that the sharpness of this…
Crystal structure generation is a foundational challenge in materials discovery, particularly in designing functional inorganic crystalline materials with desired properties. Most existing diffusion-based generative models for crystals rely…
Crystals are a state of matter characterised by periodic order. Yet crystalline materials can harbour disorder in many guises, such as non-repeating variations in composition, atom displacements, bonding arrangements, molecular…
Biominerals formed by animals provide skeletal support, and many other functions. They were previously shown to grow by aggregation of amorphous nanoparticles, but never to grow ion-by-ion from solution, which is a common growth mechanism…
The mechanical properties and long-term structural reliability of crystalline materials are strongly influenced by microstructural features such as grain size, morphology, and crystallographic texture. These characteristics not only…
Cantilevered beams are of immense importance as structural and sensorial members for a number of applications. Endowing tailorable elasticity can have wide ranging engineering ramification. Such tailorability could be possible using some…
Due to the lack of long-range order, it remains challenging to characterize the structure of disordered solids and understand the nature of the glass transition. Here we propose a new structural order parameter by taking into account…
Matrix stiffness expressions are derived for the particle movements in an assembly of rigid granules having compliant contacts. The derivations include stiffness terms that arise from the particle shapes at their contacts. These geometric…