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A simple and popular constitutive model used to describe the compressional strength of a consolidating strongly cohesive particulate gel is tested further with new experimental data. Strong cohesive particulate gels have variously been…

Elastomers filled with liquid inclusions -- as opposed to conventional solid fillers -- are a recent trend in the soft matter community because of their unique range of mechanical and physical properties. Such properties stem, in part, from…

Due to their good ratio of stiffness and strength to weight, foam materials find use in lightweight engineering. Though, in many applications like structural bending or tension, the scale separation between macroscopic structure and the…

It is widely appreciated that surface tension can dominate the behavior of liquids at small scales. Solids also have surface stresses of a similar magnitude, but they are usually overlooked. However, recent work has shown that these can…

Identifying the necessary conditions for the onset of rigidity in a gel remains a challenge. It has been suggested that local particle coordination could be used to establish such conditions, but rigid gels occur for various coordination…

Recent progress in approaches to determine the elastic constants of solids starting from the microscopic particle interactions is reviewed. On the theoretical side, density functional theory approaches are discussed and compared to more…

Assemblies of purely repulsive and frictionless particles, such as emulsions or hard spheres, display very curious properties near their jamming transition, which occurs at the random close packing for mono-disperse spheres. Although such…

In complex crystals close to melting or at finite temperatures, different types of defects are ubiquitous and their role becomes relevant in the mechanical response of these solids. Conventional elasticity theory fails to provide a…

Amongst the various fascinating types of material behavior featured by magnetic gels and elastomers are magnetostrictive effects. That is, deformations in shape or changes in volume are induced from outside by external magnetic fields.…

Colloidal suspensions have a rich rheology and can exhibit shear-thinning as well as shear-thickening. Numerical simulations recently suggested that shear-thickening may be attributed to the inertia of the colloids, besides the hydrodynamic…

The mechanical properties of amorphous solids like metallic glasses can be dramatically changed by adding small concentrations (as low as 0.1\%) of foreign elements. The glass-forming-ability, the ductility, the yield stress and the elastic…

Magnetic gels are composite materials, consisting of a polymer matrix and embedded magnetic particles. Those are mechanically coupled to each other, giving rise to the magnetostrictive effects as well as to a controllable overall elasticity…

A transition from solid-like to liquid-like behavior occurs when colloidal gels are subjected to a prolonged exposure to a steady shear. This phenomenon, which is characterized by a yielding point, is found to be strongly dependent on the…

Ionic microgel particles are intriguing systems in which the properties of thermo-responsive polymeric colloids are enriched by the presence of charged groups. In order to rationalize their properties and predict the behaviour of microgel…

We investigate the spatial correlations of microscopic stresses in soft particulate gels, using 2D and 3D numerical simulations. We use a recently developed theoretical framework predicting the analytical form of stress-stress correlations…

The buckling of a soft elastic sample under growth or swelling has highlighted a new interest in materials science, morphogenesis, and biology or physiology. Indeed, the change of mass or volume is a common fact of any living species, and…

We model the behaviour of a single colloid embedded in a cross-linked polymer gel, immersed in a viscous background fluid. External fields actuate the particle into a periodic motion, which deforms the embedding matrix and creates a local…

We present some recent theory and simulation results addressing the phenomena of colloidal gelation at both high and low volume fractions, in the presence of short-range attractive interactions. We discuss the ability of mode-coupling…

The common notion suggests that metallic glasses (MGs) are a homogeneous solid at the macroscopic scale; however, recent experiments and simulations indicate that MGs contain nano-scale elastic heterogeneities. Despite the fundamental…

Spatial heterogeneity in the elastic properties of soft random solids is investigated via a two-pronged approach. First, a nonlocal phenomenological model for the elastic free energy is examined. This features a quenched random kernel,…