Related papers: Giant deformations and soft-inflation in LCE ballo…
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 crystals (LCs) composed of mesogens play important roles in various scientific and engineering problems. How a system with many mesogens can enter a LC state is an interesting and important problem. Using stiff and free-joint…
Here, we report the rate-dependent energy absorption behavior of a liquid crystal elastomer (LCE)-based architected material consisting of repeating unit cells of bistable tilted LCE beams sandwiched between stiff supports. Viscoelastic…
Electrically-controlled dynamics of fluids and particles at microscales is a fascinating area of research with applications ranging from microfluidics and sensing to sorting of biomolecules. The driving mechanisms are electric forces acting…
Photoactive liquid crystal elastomers are polymer networks of liquid crystal mesogens embedded with chromophores like azobenzene. They undergo large deformation when illuminated by light of a certain wavelength through photochemical…
Elasticity of soft materials can be greatly influenced by the presence of air bubbles. Such a capillary effect is expected for a wide range of materials, from polymer gels to concentrated emulsions and colloidal suspensions. Whereas…
Crystal lattice deformations can be described microscopically by explicitly accounting for the position of atoms or macroscopically by continuum elasticity. In this work, we report on the description of continuous elastic fields derived…
The capillary forces exerted by liquid drops and bubbles on a soft solid are directly measured using molecular dynamics simulations. The force on the solid by the liquid near the contact line is not oriented along the liquid vapor interface…
Soft matter systems are common in nature and make up nearly all the essential components necessary for life, from cells to the organelles within those cells. The ability of these soft materials to deform is crucial for the proper…
I put forward a continuum theory for active nematic gels, defined as fluids or suspensions of orientable rodlike objects endowed with active dynamics, that is based on symmetry arguments and compatibility with thermodynamics. The starting…
Bonding between polymeric interfaces is encountered widely in several industrial applications. Many of these bonding processes rely on time-consuming and temperature-dependent classical mechanism of polymer interdiffusion via reptation in a…
Monopole-like electrostatic interactions are ubiquitous in biology and condensed matter, but they are often screened by counter-ions and cannot be switched from attractive to repulsive. In colloidal science, where the prime goal is to…
We numerically show that molecules adsorbed in a soft porous crystal form a superlattice (SL) stabilized by elastic interactions. In a mechanically flexible honeycomb lattice model, when the elastic interactions between the next nearest…
We derive a multiphysics model that accounts for network elasticity with spontaneous strains, swelling and nematic interactions in liquid crystal gels (LCGs). We discuss the coupling among the various physical mechanisms, with particular…
Soft solids with tunable mechanical response are at the core of new material technologies, but a crucial limit for applications is their progressive aging over time, which dramatically affects their functionalities. The generally accepted…
We study the deformations of elastic filaments confined within slowly-shrinking circular boundaries, under contact forces with friction. We perform computations with a spring-lattice model that deforms like a thin inextensible filament of…
Freestanding tubular crystals offer a general description of crystalline order on deformable surfaces with cylindrical topology, such as single-walled carbon nanotubes, microtubules, and recently reported colloidal assemblies. These systems…
Soft slender structures are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems and can be observed at scales that range from the nanometric to the kilometric, from polymers to space tethers. We present a practical numerical approach to simulate…
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
Elastic capsules, prepared from droplets or bubbles attached to a capillary (as in a pendant drop tensiometer), can be deflated by suction through the capillary. We study this deflation and show that a combined analysis of the shape and…