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Inspired by the cellular design of plant tissue, we present a new approach to make versatile, tough, highly water-swelling composites. We embed highly swelling hydrogel particles inside tough, water-permeable, elastomeric matrices. The…
Thermo-responsive hydrogels are smart materials that rapidly switch between hydrophilic (swollen) and hydrophobic (shrunken) states when heated past a threshold temperature, resulting in order-of-magnitude changes in gel volume. Modelling…
Hydrogels are widespread soft materials, which can serve a wide range of applications. The control over the viscoelastic properties of the gel is of paramount importance. Ongoing environmental issues have raised the consumer's concern…
Nanostructured palladium foams offer exciting potential for applications in diverse fields such as catalyst, fuel cell, and particularly hydrogen storage technologies. We have fabricated palladium nanowire foams using a cross-linking and…
Hydrogel adhesion that can be easily modulated in magnitude, space, and time is desirable in many emerging applications ranging from tissue engineering, and soft robotics, to wearable devices. In synthetic materials, these complex adhesion…
Soft materials with a liquid component are an emerging paradigm in materials design. The incorporation of a liquid phase, such as water, liquid metals, or complex fluids, into solid materials imparts unique properties and characteristics…
Aqueous foams are solid materials composed of gases and liquids, exhibiting a large gas/liquid surface area and enabling dynamic exchanges between their fluid components. The structure of binary-gas foams, whose bubbles consist of a mixture…
Catch bonds are interactions whose lifetimes increase under mechanical load, a counterintuitive behaviour that underlies diverse biological processes. Translating this mechanism to synthetic materials offers the potential to create systems…
Foam is a canonical example of disordered soft matter where local force balance leads to the competition of many metastable configurations. Here we present an experimental and theoretical framework for "active foam" where an individual…
Shape-programmable soft materials that exhibit integrated multifunctional shape manipulations, including reprogrammable, untethered, fast, and reversible shape transformation and locking, are highly desirable for a plethora of applications,…
Programmable materials are desirable for a variety of functional applications that range from biomedical devices, actuators and soft robots to adaptive surfaces and deployable structures. However, current smart materials are often designed…
We describe a fluidic actuator design that replaces the sealed chamber of a hydraulic cylinder using a soft actuator to provide compliant linear compression with a large force ($\geq$100 N) at a low operation pressure ($\leq$50 kPa) for a…
This study proposes a family of novel mechanically-soft and magnetically-hard magnetorheological foams that, upon deformation, lead to robust and measurable magnetic flux changes in their surroundings. This allows to infer qualitatively and…
A variety of complex fluids consist in soft, round objects (foams, emulsions, assemblies of copolymer micelles or of multilamellar vesicles -- also known as onions). Their dense packing induces a slight deviation from their prefered…
Reactive bonding film is a relatively new method of fusing materials with the potential to meet needs of particle tracker mechanics under development due to its resulting tensile strength, thermal conductivity, radiation tolerance, and low…
This contribution reports for the first time on fabrication and investigation of wetting properties of structured surfaces containing lamellae with an exceptionally high aspect ratio - height/width ratio demonstrated of 57:1. The lamellar…
This research introduces a novel hydrofoil-based propulsion framework for unmanned aquatic robots, inspired by the undulating locomotion observed in select aquatic species. The proposed system incorporates a camber-modulating mechanism to…
Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
Hydrogels are particularly versatile materials that are widely found in both Nature and industry. One key reason for this versatility is their high water content, which lets them dramatically change their volume and many of their mechanical…
The interaction of flexible polymers with fluid flows leads to a number of intriguing phenomena observed in laboratory experiments, namely drag reduction, elastic turbulence and heat transport modification in natural convection, and is one…