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Many biological materials such as cervical mucus and collagen gel possess a fibrous micro-structure. This micro-structure affects the emergent mechanical properties of the material, and hence the functional behaviour of the system. We…
Rheological properties of a material often require to be probed under extensional deformation. Examples include fibrous materials such as spider-silk, high-molecular weight polymer melts, and the contractile response of living cells. Such…
A thin, elastic sheet floating on the surface of a liquid bath wrinkles when poked at its centre. We study the onset of wrinkling as well as the evolution of the pattern as indentation progresses far beyond the wrinkling threshold. We use…
Shear cell tests have been conducted on twenty different lactose powders, most of which commercially available for oral or inhalation purposes, spanning a wide range of particle sizes, particle morphologies, production processes. The aims…
Building off recent advances on how to practically use exponential shear in a torsional rheometer to compute transient planar extensional viscosity (Kroo et al. 2025a), we extend the technique to cyclic tensile measurements in complex…
We carry out a theoretical study of the vibrational and relaxation properties of naturally-occurring proteins with the purpose of characterizing both the folding and equilibrium thermodynamics. By means of a suitable model we provide a full…
Contacts between particles in dense, sheared suspensions are believed to underpin much of their rheology. Roughness and adhesion are known to constrain the relative motion of particles, and thus globally affect the shear response, but an…
Why do we need to pour less water in an egg steamer to prepare more eggs to the same degree of doneness? We discuss the physical processes at work in the electric egg steamer and resolve this seeming paradox. We demonstrate that the main…
In everyday life we encounter many complex fluids, from shear-thinning paint and toothpaste to shear-thickening starch suspensions. The study of their properties offers an opportunity for students to relate sophisticated physical concepts…
Recent experiments have shown that surface stresses in soft materials can have a significant strain-dependence. Here we explore the implications of this surface elasticity to show how, and when, we expect it to arise. We develop the…
We propose a novel method for measuring linear and non-linear viscoelastic properties of a liquid by the oscillatory motion of an immersed rotating body in a vessel. The shape of a rotating object is general and we tested four different…
Many objects in nature and industry are wrapped in a thin sheet to enhance their chemical, mechanical, or optical properties. There are similarly a variety of methods for wrapping, from pressing a film onto a hard substrate, to using…
A series of experiments for steady state rotation of water in vessels of various geometries is presented. The experiments focus on the geometrical characteristics of the rotating liquids and the change in their surface topology, from that…
Numerical simulations of vesicle suspensions are performed in two dimensions to study their dynamical and rheological properties. An hybrid method is adopted, which combines a mesoscopic approach for the solvent with a curvature-elasticity…
Anisotropically wetting substrates enable useful control of droplet behavior across a range of applications. Usually, these involve chemically or physically patterning the substrate surface, or applying gradients in properties like…
We derive the effective energy density of thin membranes of liquid crystal elastomers as the Gamma-limit of a widely used bulk model. These membranes can display fine-scale features both due to wrinkling that one expects in thin elastic…
The structure of DNA in the nucleosome core particle is studied using an elastic model that incorporates anisotropy in the bending energetics and twist-bend coupling. Using the experimentally determined structure of nucleosomal DNA [T.J.…
Colloidal gels constitute an important class of materials found in many contexts and with a wide range of applications. Yet as matter far from equilibrium, gels exhibit a variety of time-dependent behaviours, which can be perplexing, such…
The detachment dynamics of a fluid membrane with an isotropic spontaneous curvature from a flat substrate are studied by using meshless membrane simulations. The membrane is detached from an open edge leading to vesicle formation. With…
The formation of periodic wrinkles in soft layered materials due to mechanical instabilities is prevalent in nature and has been proposed for use in multiple applications. However, such phenomena have been explored predominantly in…