Related papers: Force chain structure in a rod-withdrawn granular …
Granular packings of non-convex or elongated particles can form free-standing structures like walls or arches. For some particle shapes, such as staples, the rigidity arises from interlocking of pairs of particles, but the origins of…
We investigate how ferrofluid droplets suspended in a wall-bounded shear flow can organise when subjected to an external magnetic field. By tuning the magnitude of the external magnetic field, we find that the ferrofluid droplets form…
In the present paper we revisit, theoretical and experimentally, the fall of a folded U-chain and of a pile-chain. The model calculation implies the division of the whole system into two subsystems of variable mass, allowing to explore the…
Understanding cellular response to mechanical forces is immensely important for a plethora of biological processes. Focal adhesions are multi-molecular protein assemblies that connect the cell to the extracellular matrix and play a pivotal…
Classical descriptions of flapping propulsion near a free surface emphasize the energetic penalties of wave generation, treating the interface primarily as an energy sink. Here, we show that the same deformable boundary can also act as a…
Depletion-induced aggregation of rods enhanced by clustering is observed to produce a novel model of attractive pairs of rods separated by a line of spheres in a quasi-2D, vertically-shaken, granular gas of rods and spheres. We show that…
When an elastic object is dragged through a viscous fluid tangent to a rigid boundary, it experiences a lift force perpendicular to its direction of motion. An analogous lift mechanism occurs when a rigid symmetric object translates…
Generation of mechanical force regulated by external electric field is studied both theoretically and by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The force arises in deformable bodies linked to the free end of a grafted polyelectrolyte chain…
It is shown here that fracture after a brief plastic strain, typically of a few percents, is a necessary consequence of the polycrystalline nature of the materials. The polycrystal undergoing plastic deformation is modeled as a flowing…
We investigate the gravity driven rapid failure of a granular step composed of non-cohesive steel beads. The step is initially held together with electromagnets, and released when the current is switched off. We visualize the surface and…
When a solid plate is withdrawn from a partially wetting liquid, a liquid layer dewets the moving substrate. High-speed imaging reveals alternating thin and thick regions in the entrained layer in the transverse direction at steady state.…
We briefly discuss an arch-like structure that forms and grows during the rapid straightening of a chain lying on a table. This short note accompanies a fluid dynamics video submission (V029) to the APS DFD Gallery of Fluid Motion 2011.
We present a minimalistic approach to simulations of force transmission through granular systems. We start from a configuration containing cohesive (tensile) contact forces and use an adaptive procedure to find the stable configuration with…
The influence of an external field acting differently on the two constituents of a binary colloidal mixture performing Brownian dynamics is investigated by computer simulations and a simple theory. In our model, one half of the particles…
We find the collapse of columns of granular rods to show range of behaviors that depends on particle aspect ratio (length $L$ to diameter $d$) and initial pile geometry (height/radius). For all aspect ratios $L/d$ below 24 there exists a…
Understanding how granular materials respond to shear stress remains a central challenge in soft matter physics. We report direct observations of persistent granular convection in the bulk shear zones of spherical particle packings -- a…
We employ a first principles, force-level approach to self-consistently construct the anharmonic tube confinement field for entangled fluids of rigid needles and for primitive-path (PP) level chains in two limiting situations where chain…
Developing quantitative methods for characterizing structural properties of force chains in densely packed granular media is an important step toward understanding or predicting large-scale physical properties of a packing. A promising…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and grains are omnipresent in daily life, industrial applications, and earth-science [1]. When unperturbed, they form stable structures that resemble the ones of other amorphous solids like metallic…
Can active forces be exploited to drive the consistent collapse of an active polymer into a folded structure? In this paper we introduce and perform numerical simulations of a simple model of active colloidal folders, and show that a…