Related papers: Two phase models for elastic membranes with soft i…
We study numerically how multiple deformable capsules squeeze into a constriction. This situation is largely encountered in microfluidic chips designed to manipulate living cells, which are soft entities. We use fully three-dimensional…
At present, there is an abundance of results showing that the phase-field approach to fracture in elastic brittle materials -- when properly accounting for material strength -- describes the \emph{nucleation} of fracture from large…
We consider a free-boundary and free-discontinuity energy connecting phase separation and fracture in an elastic material. The energy excludes the contribution of phase boundaries in the cracked region, providing a heuristic approximation…
From bone and wood to concrete and carbon fibre, composites are ubiquitous natural and engineering materials. Eshelby's inclusion theory describes how macroscopic stress fields couple to isolated microscopic inclusions, allowing prediction…
This paper is concerned with the Boundary Element simulation of elastic domains that contain thin inclusions that have elastic material properties, which are different to the domain. With thin inclusions we mean inclusions with extreme…
Confinement can have a dramatic effect on the behavior of all sorts of particulate systems and it therefore is an important phenomenon in many different areas of physics and technology. Here, we investigate the role played by the softness…
Three general modes are distinguished in the deformation of a thin shell; these are stretching, drilling, and bending. Of these, the drilling mode is the one more likely to emerge in a soft matter shell (as compared to a hard, structural…
This paper studies a two-phase material with a microstructure composed of a hard brittle reinforcement phase embedded in a soft ductile matrix. It addresses the full three-dimensional nature of the microstructure and macroscopic…
Embedding rigid inclusions into elastic matrix materials is a procedure of high practical relevance, for instance for the fabrication of elastic composite materials. We theoretically analyze the following situation. Rigid spherical…
Many biological materials consist of sparse networks of disordered fibres, embedded in a soft elastic matrix. The interplay between rigid and soft elements in such composite networks leads to mechanical properties that can go far beyond the…
We formulate an effective medium (mean field) theory of a material consisting of randomly distributed nodes connected by straight slender rods, hinged at the nodes. Defining novel wavelength-dependent effective elastic moduli, we calculate…
Elastic models of the glass transition relate the relaxation dynamics and the elastic properties of structural glasses. They are based on the assumption that the relaxation dynamics occurs through activated events in the energy landscape…
We study the pinning of a two-dimensional membrane to a patterned substrate within elastic theory both in the bending rigidity and in the strain dominated regimes. We find that both the in-plane strains and the bending rigidity can lead to…
The concept of fluctuation-induced effective interactions is extended to systems driven out of equilibrium. We compute the forces experienced by macroscopic objects immersed in a soft material driven by external shaking sources. We show…
When a thin film moderately adherent to a substrate is subjected to residual stress, the cooperation between fracture and delamination leads to unusual fracture patterns, such as spirals, alleys of crescents and various types of strips, all…
Soft particles such as microgels and core-shell particles can undergo significant and anisotropic deformations when adsorbed to a liquid interface. This, in turn, leads to a complex phase behavior upon compression. Here we develop a…
A system of soft ellipsoid molecules confined between two planar walls is studied using classical Density Functional Theory (DFT). Both the isotropic and nematic phases are considered. The excess free energy is evaluated using two different…
Fatigue fracture is one of the main causes of failure in structures. However, the simulation of fatigue crack growth is computationally demanding due to the large number of load cycles involved. Metals in the low cycle fatigue range often…
We compute effective energies of thin bilayer structures composed by soft nematic elastic-liquid crystals in various geometrical regimes and functional configurations. Our focus is on order-strain interaction in elastic foundations composed…
Recently proposed phase-field models offer self-consistent descriptions of brittle fracture. Here, we analyze these theories in the quasistatic regime of crack propagation. We show how to derive the laws of crack motion either by using…