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Polyelectrolyte gels are a very attractive class of actuation materials with remarkable electronic and mechanical properties with a great similarity to biological contractile tissues. They consist of a polymer network with ionizable groups…
In recent years, ionic microgels have garnered much attention due to their unique properties, especially their stimulus-sensitive swelling behavior. The tunable response of these soft, permeable, compressible, charged colloidal particles is…
Gels made of telechelic polymers connected by reversible crosslinkers are a versatile design platform for biocompatible viscoelastic materials. Their linear response to a step strain displays a fast, near-exponential relaxation when using…
The morphology of a mixture made of a polar active gel immersed in an isotropic passive fluid is studied numerically. Lattice Boltzmann method is adopted to solve the Navier-Stokes equation and coupled to a finite-difference scheme used to…
Molecular dynamics simulations have been employed to study the formation of a physical (thermoreversible) gel by amphiphilic A-B-A triblock copolymers in aqueous solution. In order to mimic the structure of hydrogel-forming polypeptides…
We present dynamic light scattering (DLS) measurements of soft polymethyl-methacrylate (PMMA) and polyacrylamide(PA) polymer gels prepared with trapped bodies (latex spheres or maghemite nanoparticles). We show that the anomalous…
Nanostructured materials formed via kinetically controlled self-assembly processes gather more interest nowadays. Bicontinuous emulsion gels stabilized by colloidal particles, called bijels, are attractive materials in soft-matter as they…
We investigate the dynamics of an active gel of bundled microtubules that is driven by clusters of kinesin molecular motors. Upon the addition of ATP, the coordinated action of thousands of molecular motors drives the gel to a highly…
We propose a theory based on non-equilibrium thermodynamics to describe the mechanical behavior of an active polymer gel created by the inclusion of molecular motors in its solvent. When activated, these motors attach to the chains of the…
Active materials capable of autonomously modulating their mechanical properties are foundational to the development of next-generation soft technologies. Here, we introduce a novel class of extensible biohybrid hydrogels powered by living…
When a gel absorbs solvent from surrounding, stress field is created in the gel, and this causes complex dynamics of the swelling behavior. Here we study this effect for disk-shaped gel by rigorously solving the diffusio-mechanical coupling…
Microgels are soft colloids that, in virtue of their polymeric nature, can react to external stimuli such as temperature or pH by changing their size. The resulting swelling/deswelling transition can be exploited in fundamental research as…
We use computer simulations to investigate how a catalytic reaction in a polymer sol can induce the formation of a polymer gel. To this aim we consider a solution of homopolymers in which freely-diffusing catalysts convert the originally…
We report on rate-dependent fracture energy measurements over three decades of steady crack velocities in alginate and gelatin hydrogels. We evidence that, irrespective of gel thermo-reversibility, thermally activated "unzipping" of the…
Active gels play an important role in biology and in inspiring biomimetic active materials, due to their ability to change shape, size and create their own morphology; the relevant mechanics behind these changes is driven by…
We develop a new quantitative molecular theory of liquid-phase dipolar polymer gels. We model monomer units of the polymer network as a couple of charged sites separated by a fluctuating distance. For the first time, within the random phase…
An excitable chemical medium --- Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction --- is proven to be a fruitful substrate for prototyping unconventional computing devices. These include image processors, logical circuits, and robot controllers. We study…
Active gels are a class of biologically-relevant material containing embedded agents that spontaneously generate forces acting on a sparse filament network. In vitro experiments of protein filaments and molecular motors have revealed a…
Tuning the chain-end functionality of a short-chain cationic homopolymer, owing to the nature of the initiator used in the ATRP polymerisation step, can be used to mediate the formation of a gel of this poly(electrolyte) in water. While a…
We investigate numerically, by a hybrid lattice Boltzmann method, the morphology and the dynamics of an emulsion made of a polar active gel, contractile or extensile, and an isotropic passive fluid. We focus on the case of a highly…