Related papers: Spider silks mechanics: predicting humidity and te…
Differential shrinkage in particulate quasi-brittle materials causes microcracking which reduces durability in these materials by increasing their mass transport properties. A hydro-mechanical three-dimensional periodic network approach was…
Liquid wetting of a surface is omnipresent in nature and the advance of micro-fabrication and assembly techniques in recent years offers increasing ability to control this phenomenon. Here, we identify how surface roughness influences the…
Spider dragline silk shows well-known outstanding mechanical properties. However, its sigmoidal shape of the measured stress-strain curves (i.e. the yield) can not be described by classical polymer theories and recent hierarchical chain…
Super-cooled liquids are characterized by their fragility: the slowing down of the dynamics under cooling is more sudden and the jump of specific heat at the glass transition is generally larger in fragile liquids than in strong ones.…
Using molecular dynamics computer simulations we investigate how in silica the glass transition and the properties of the resulting glass depend on the cooling rate with which the sample is cooled. By coupling the system to a heat bath with…
Soft solids and their surface deformations control the response of many natural and artificial systems. Yet, their underlying properties are vigorously debated, particularly for polymer networks. While molecular-scale theories predict no…
Mechanical shear deformations lead, in some cases, to effects similar to those resulting from ion irradiation. Here we characterize the effects of shear velocity and temperature on amorphous silicon (\aSi) modelled using classical molecular…
The present investigation examines the relationship between structural order, diffusivity anomalies, and density anomalies in liquid silica by means of molecular dynamics simulations. We use previously defined orientational and…
Molecular spiders are synthetic molecular motors based on DNA nanotechnology. While natural molecular motors have evolved towards very high efficiency, it remains a major challenge to develop efficient designs for man-made molecular motors.…
The plasticity of amorphous solids undergoing shear is characterized by quasi-localized rearrangements of particles. While many models of plasticity exist, the precise relationship between plastic dynamics and the structure of a particle's…
Motivated by recent experimental observations of capillary-induced spooling of fibers inside droplets both in spider capture silk and in synthetic systems, we investigate the behavior of a fiber packed in a drop. Using a simplified 2D…
Living systems are built of multiscale-composites: materials formed of components with different properties that are assembled in complex micro- and nano-structures. Such biological multiscale-composites often show outstanding physical…
A core-softened model of a glass forming fluid is numerically studied in the limit of very low temperatures. The model shows two qualitatively different behaviors depending on the strength of the attraction between particles. For no or low…
The mechanical response, serviceability, and load bearing capacity of materials and structural components can be adversely affected due to external stimuli, which include exposure to a corrosive chemical species, high temperatures,…
In the present work we study the spider's hair flow-sensing system by using fluid-structure interaction (FSI) numerical simulations. We observe experimentally the morphology of Theraphosa stirmi's hairs and characterize their mechanical…
Microgels made of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) are the prototype of soft, thermoresponsive particles widely used to study fundamental problems in condensed matter physics. However, their internal structure is far from homogeneous, and…
The incredible thermo-mechanical properties of biological materials arise from the microscopic scale due to a complex hierarchical mechanism, regulated by microinstabilities at the molecular level. The description of such complex structures…
Tetrahedral liquids such as water and silica-melt show unusual thermodynamic behavior such as a density maximum and an increase in specific-heat when cooled to low temperatures. There is a debate in the literature whether these phenomena…
A simple three-dimensional model of a fluid whose constituent particles interact via a short range attractive and long range repulsive potential is used to model the aggregation into large spherical-like clusters made up of hundreds of…
Cells contain multiple condensates which spontaneously form due to the heterotypic interactions between their components. Although the proteins and disordered region sequences that are responsible for condensate formation have been…