Related papers: Hydroelastomers: soft, tough, highly swelling comp…
Recent studies demonstrated that an elastomer containing hygroscopic inclusions absorbs moisture and swell. Here we show that a thin film of such an elastomer bonded to a rigid substrate undergoes morphological instability upon absorption…
Programmable materials are desirable for a variety of functional applications that range from biomedical devices, actuators and soft robots to adaptive surfaces and deployable structures. However, current smart materials are often designed…
Macroscale robotic systems have demonstrated great capabilities of high speed, precise, and agile functions. However, the ability of soft robots to perform complex tasks, especially in centimeter and millimeter scale, remains limited due to…
The rise of soft materials and additive manufacturing has provided the feasibility of developing elastomer lattices for various engineering applications. Although earlier attempts have been made to manufacture and test the elastomer…
Soft actuators have drawn significant attention from researchers with an inherently compliant design to address the safety issues in physical human-robot interactions. However, they are also vulnerable and pose new challenges in the design,…
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…
Sorbents are promising materials for applications in atmospheric water harvesting, thermal energy storage, and passive cooling, thereby addressing central challenges related to water scarcity and the global energy transition. Recently,…
Extensibility is beyond the paradigm of classical soft glassy materials, and more broadly, yield-stress fluids. Recently, model yield-stress fluids with significant extensibility have been designed by adding polymeric phases to classically…
Vesicular capsules are used to carry biochemicals in biology and liposome technology. Being water-permeable with differing interior and exterior compositions, they are necessarily under osmotic stress. Recent studies have underlined the…
Microcapsules are a key class of microscale materials with applications in areas ranging from personal care to biomedicine, and with increasing potential to act as extracellular matrix (ECM) models of hollow organs or tissues. Such capsules…
A polymer network can imbibe water, forming an aggregate called hydrogel, and undergo large and inhomogeneous deformation with external mechanical constraint. Due to the large deformation, nonlinearity plays a crucial role, which also…
An emerging theme across many domains of science and engineering is materials that change shape, often dramatically. Determining their structure involves solving a shape optimization problem where a given energy functional is minimized with…
The interaction of flexible polymers with fluid flows leads to a number of intriguing phenomena observed in laboratory experiments, namely drag reduction, elastic turbulence and heat transport modification in natural convection, and is one…
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…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
Liquid crystals are synthetic and biological viscoelastic anisotropic soft matter materials that combine liquid fluidity with crystal anisotropy and find use in optical devices, sensor/actuators, lubrication, super-fibers. Frequently…
This work presents a model for characterizing porous, deformable media embedded with magnetorheological fluids (MRFs). These active fluids exhibit tunable mechanical and rheological properties that can be controlled through the application…
Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a promising solution for handling the complexity of fabricating soft robots. However, the AM of hyperelastic materials is still challenging with a limited material range. Within this work, pellet-based 3D…
We consider a linearly elastic composite medium, which consists of a homogeneous matrix containing a statistically homogeneous set of multimodal spherical inclusions modeling the morphology of heterogeneous solid propellants (HSP).…
Hydrogels engineered for medical use within the human body need to be delivered in a minimally invasive fashion without altering their biochemical and mechanical properties to maximize their therapeutic outcomes. In this regard, key…