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Ice-templating, also referred to as freeze-casting, is a process exploiting unidirectional crystallization of ice to structure macroporous materials from colloidal solutions. Commonly applied to inorganic and polymeric materials, we employ…
This paper presents a new solver developed in OpenFOAM for the modeling of lubricant in the narrow gap between two surfaces inducing hydrodynamic pressures up to few gigapascal. Cavitation is modeled using the homogeneous equilibrium model.…
Polymer syntactic foams are transforming materials that will shape the future of next-generation aerospace and marine structures. When manufactured using traditional processes, like compression molding, syntactic foams consist of a solid…
Controlling the viscoelastic properties of hydrogels is a challenge for many applications. Low molecular weight gelators (LMWG) like bile salts and glycolipids, and biopolymers like chitosan and alginate, are good candidates for developing…
Fully bioresorbable polymer matrix composites have long been considered as potential orthopaedic implant materials, however their combination of mechanical strength, stiffness, ductility and bioresorbability is also attractive for cardiac…
There is a growing need for robots that can change their shape, size and mechanical properties to adapt to evolving tasks and environments. However, current shape-changing systems generally utilize bespoke, system-specific mechanisms that…
Warm Dense Matter lies at the frontier between condensed matter and plasma, and plays a central role in various fields ranging from planetary science to inertial confinement fusion. Improving our understanding of this regime requires…
Bio-inspired soft robots have already shown the ability to handle uncertainty and adapt to unstructured environments. However, their availability is partially restricted by time-consuming, costly and highly supervised design-fabrication…
Additive manufacturing strives to combine any combination of materials into three dimensional functional structures and devices, ultimately opening up the possibility of 3D printed machines. It remains difficult to actuate such devices,…
Amorphous materials as diverse as foams, emulsions, colloidal suspensions and granular media can {\em jam} into a rigid, disordered state where they withstand finite shear stresses before yielding. The jamming transition has been studied…
From microactuators to biological tissues, non-porous materials with the ability to strongly expand when in contact with a solvent are ubiquitous. Consequently, the swelling of polymer systems such as hydrogel has received recently much…
By means of multicanonical computer simulations, we investigate thermodynamic properties of the aggregation of interacting semiflexible polymers. We analyze a mesoscopic bead-stick model, where nonbonded monomers interact via Lennard-Jones…
Active matter drives its constituent agents to move autonomously by harnessing free energy, leading to diverse emergent states with relevance to both biological processes and inanimate functionalities. Achieving maximum reconfigurability of…
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…
Porous and flexible actuating materials are important in the development of smart systems. We report here a facile method to prepare scalable, flexible actuating porous membranes based on a poly(ionic liquid)-modified tissue paper. The…
Switchable adhesives have the potential to improve the manufacturing and recycling of parts and to enable new modes of motility for soft robots. Here, we demonstrate magnetically-switchable adhesion of a two-phase composite to non-magnetic…
Tissue engineering aims to grow artificial tissues \emph{in vitro} to replace those in the body that have been damaged through age, trauma or disease. A recent approach to engineer artificial cartilage involves seeding cells within a…
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…
Flexible photonics offers the possibility to realize wearable sensors by bridging the advantages of flexible materials and photonic sensing elements. Recently, optical resonators have emerged as a tool to improve its over sensitivity by…
We present a physics-based framework to simulate porous, deformable materials and interactive tools with haptic feedback that can reshape it. In order to allow the material to be moulded non-homogeneously, we propose an algorithm to change…