Related papers: Measuring and upscaling micromechanical interactio…
When a colloidal suspension is dried, capillary pressure may overwhelm repulsive electrostatic forces, assembling aggregates that are out of thermal equilibrium. This poorly understood process confers cohesive strength to many geological…
Analyses of impact provide rich insights from the evolution of granular bodies to their structural properties of the surface and subsurface layers of celestial bodies. Although chemical cohesive bonding has been observed in asteroid…
We have studied the effect of small amounts of added liquid on the dynamic behavior of a granular system consisting of a mixture of glass beads of two different sizes. Segregation of the large beads to the top of the sample is found to…
The dependence of mechanical properties on microscopic interactions remains a central problem in the physics of disordered solids near the jamming transition. We numerically and theoretically investigate the mechanical response of jammed…
Particle surface chemistry and internal softness are two fundamental parameters in governing the mechanical properties of dense colloidal suspensions, dictating structure and flow, therefore of interest from materials fabrication to…
The elastic coupling between plastic events is generally invoked to interpret plastic properties and failure of amorphous soft glassy materials. We report an experiment where the emergence of a self-organized plastic flow is observed well…
Cohesive granular materials are found in many natural and industrial environments, but experimental platforms for exploring the innate mechanical properties of these materials are often limited by the difficulty of adjusting cohesion…
The macroscopic properties of materials that we observe and exploit in engineering application result from complex interactions between physics at multiple length and time scales: electronic, atomistic, defects, domains etc. Multiscale…
We present a simple method for accessing the elastic properties of microscopic deformable particles. This method is based on measuring the pressure-induced deformation of soft particles as they are forced through a tapered glass…
One of the major shortcomings of discrete element modelling (DEM) is the computational cost required when the number of particles is huge, especially for fine powders and/or industry scale simulations. This study investigates the scaling of…
We poorly understand the macroscopic properties of complex fluids and of amorphous bodies in general. This is mainly due to the interplay between phenomena at different levels and length-scales. In particular, it is not necessarily true…
Slow dynamic nonlinearity is ubiquitous amongst brittle materials, such as rocks and concrete, with cracked microstructures. A defining feature of the behavior is the logarithmic-in-time recovery of stiffness after a mechanical…
We design, fabricate and test heterogeneous architected polycrystals, composed of hard plastomers and soft elastomers, which thus show outstanding mechanical resilience and energy dissipation simultaneously. Grain boundaries that separate…
Cohesive granular materials such as wet sand, snow, and powders can flow like a viscous liquid. However, the elementary mechanisms of momentum transport in such athermal particulate fluids are elusive. As a result, existing models for…
Processes of mixing and segregation in a packed bed of granular material stirred by a periodically moving rectangular bar are simulated by the discrete element method (DEM). Influence of mechanical properties of the particle material…
Macroscopic properties of suspensions, such as those composed of globular particles (e.g., colloidal or macromolecular), can be tuned by controlling the equilibrium aggregation of the particles. We examine how aggregation -- and, hence,…
The jamming transition is an important feature of granular materials, with prior work showing an excess of low frequency modes in the granular analog to the density of states, the granular density of modes. In this work, we present an…
Soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions, and biological systems, are typically multicomponent mixtures of macromolecules and simpler components (e.g., microions, monomers, solvent) that can assemble into complex…
Granular media near jamming exhibit fascinating properties, which can be harnessed to create jammed-granulate metamaterials: materials whose characteristics arise not only from the shape and material properties of the particles at the…
Mechanical properties are of central importance to materials sciences, in particular if they depend on external stimuli. Here we investigate the rheological response of amorphous solids, namely col- loidal glasses, to external forces. Using…