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Lack of stiffness often limits thin shape-shifting structures to small scales. The large in-plane transformations required to distort the metrics are indeed commonly achieved by using soft hydrogels or elastomers. We introduce here a…
In layered materials, a common mode of deformation involves buckling of the layers under tensile deformation in the direction perpendicular to the layers. The instability mechanism, which operates in elastic materials from geological to…
Plasticized poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) is a jelly-like soft dielectric material that attracted substantial interest recently as a new type of electro-active polymers. Under electric fields of several hundred Volt/mm, PVC gels undergo large…
Recent experimental observations have suggested that topological defects can facilitate the creation of sharp features in developing embryos. Whereas these observations echo established knowledge about the interplay between geometry and…
Active semiflexible filament collectives, ranging from motor-driven cytoskeletal filaments to slender organisms such as cyanobacteria and worm aggregates, abound in nature. Yet how activity and flexibility jointly govern their organization,…
A nematic liquid-crystal gel is a macroscopically homogeneous elastic medium with the rotational symmetry of a nematic liquid crystal. In this paper, we develop a general approach to the study of these gels that incorporates all underlying…
In the context of finite elasticity, we propose plate models describing the spontaneous bending of nematic elastomer thin films due to variations along the thickness of the nematic order parameters. Reduced energy functionals are deduced…
Confined glasses and their anomalous interfacial rheology raise important questions in fundamental research and numerous practical applications. In this Letter, we study the influence of interfacial air nanobubbles on the free surface of…
As 2D materials such as graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, and 2D polymers become more prevalent, solution processing and colloidal-state properties are being exploited to create advanced and functional materials. However, our…
Pneumatic soft robots are typically fabricated by molding, a manual fabrication process that requires skilled labor. Additive manufacturing has the potential to break this limitation and speed up the fabrication process but struggles with…
Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions and liquid crystals are constituted by mesoscopic entities held together by weak forces. Their mechanical moduli are several orders of magnitude lower than those of atomic…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials are compliant structures engineered to achieve unique properties via the large deformation of their components. While their static character has been studied extensively, the study of their dynamic…
Limiting chain extensibility is a characteristic that plays a vital role in the stretching of highly elastic materials. The Gent model has been widely used to capture this behaviour, as it performs very well in fitting stress-stretch data…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked polymer networks covalently bonded with liquid crystal mesogens. In the nematic phase, due to strong coupling between mechanical strain and orientational order, these materials display…
This work aims to describe a mathematical model and a numerical method to simulate a thin anisotropic composite membrane moving and deforming in 3D space under a dynamic load of an arbitrary time and space profile. The model and the method…
We study anomalous elasticity in the tubule phases of nematic and smectic elastomer membranes, which are flat in one direction and crumpled in another. These phases share the same macroscopic symmetry properties including…
In this paper, we study an elastic bilayer plate composed of a nematic liquid crystal elastomer in the top layer and a nonlinearly elastic material in the bottom layer. While the bottom layer is assumed to be stress-free in the flat…
We study the snapping instability of a spherical elastic shell induced by a viscous flow, the umbrella flipping problem when life is at low Reynolds numbers. We combine precision desktop-scale experiments, fluid-structure simulations, shell…
Dielectric elastomers have recently been proposed for various biologically-relevant applications, in which they may operate in fluidic environments where surface tension effects may have a significant effect on their stability and…
Here we use large-scale molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the high-rate deformation of nanocrystalline tantalum to investigate the processes associated with plastic deformation for strains up to 100%. We use initial atomic…