Related papers: Magneto-active elastic shells with tunable bucklin…
Recent experiments have exploited elastic instabilities in membranes to create complex patterns. However, the rational design of such structures poses many challenges, as they are products of nonlinear elastic behavior. We pose a simple…
A convection-driven MHD dynamo in a rotating spherical shell, with clearly defined structural elements in the flow and magnetic field, is simulated numerically. Such dynamos can be called deterministic, in contrast to those explicitly…
Parametric instabilities are a known feature of periodically driven dynamic systems; at particular frequencies and amplitudes of the driving modulation, the system's quasi-periodic response undergoes a frequency lock-in, leading to a…
We explore how thermal fluctuations affect the mechanics of thin amorphous spherical shells. In flat membranes with a shear modulus, thermal fluctuations increase the bending rigidity and reduce the in-plane elastic moduli in a…
Architected materials that exploit buckling instabilities to reversibly trap energy have been shown to be effective for impact protection. The energy-absorbing capabilities of these architected materials can be enhanced further by…
A structural element is designed and investigated, forming the basis for the development of an elastic multistable metamaterial. The leitmotif of the structural design is the implementation of a strut characterized by a bifurcation…
Designing materials that can effectively and repeatedly absorb energy from unpredictable directions represents a grand challenge in modern engineering, crucial for applications from vehicle crashworthiness systems to personal protective…
Gels are used to design bilayered structures with high residual stresses. The swelling of a thin layer on a compliant substrate leads to compressive stresses. The post-buckling of this layer is investigated experimentally; the wavelengths…
The interplay between cytoskeletal architecture and the nonlinearity of the interactions due to bucklable filaments plays a key role in modulating the cell's mechanical stability and affecting its structural rearrangements. We study a model…
This research investigates dynamic response of tunable periodic structures and homogenization methods in magnetoelastic composites (MECs). The research on tunable periodic structures is focused on the design, modeling and understanding of…
Nonlinear micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) resonators open new opportunities in sensing and signal manipulation compared to their linear counterparts by enabling frequency tuning and increased bandwidth. Here, we design, fabricate…
A rectangular thin elastic sheet is deformed by forcing a contact between two points at the middle of its length. A transition to buckling with stress focusing is reported for the sheets sufficiently narrow with a critical width…
Numerical simulations of thin sheets undergoing large deformations are computationally challenging. Depending on the scenario, they may spontaneously buckle, wrinkle, fold, or crumple. Nature's thin tissues often experience significant…
Thin sheets that are forced at their boundaries develop a variety of shapes aimed at minimising elastic energy by curving spontaneously in ways that break the symmetry of the sheet and the forcing. Characterising such buckling generally…
Spontaneous material shape changes, such as swelling, growth or thermal expansion, can be used to trigger dramatic elastic instabilities in thin shells. These instabilities originate in geometric incompatibility between the preferred…
Bifurcation of an elastic structure crucially depends on the curvature of the constraints against which the ends of the structure are prescribed to move, an effect which deserves more attention than it has received so far. In fact, we show…
Beams made from thin-walled elements, whilst very efficient in terms of the structural strength and stiffness to weight ratios, can be susceptible to highly complex instability phenomena. A nonlinear analytical formulation based on…
The production of mechanical stresses in living organisms largely relies on localized, force-generating active units embedded in filamentous matrices. Numerical simulations of discrete fiber networks with fixed boundaries have shown that…
Pressurized elastic shells are ubiquitous in nature and technology, from the outer walls of yeast and bacterial cells to artificial pressure vessels. Indentation measurements simultaneously probe the internal pressure and elastic properties…
Thermo-responsive hydrogels are a promising material for creating controllable actuators for use in micro-scale devices, since they expand and contract significantly (absorbing or expelling fluid) in response to relatively small temperature…