Related papers: Hydroelastomers: soft, tough, highly swelling comp…
Liquid crystal elastomers are rubbery solids that couple liquid crystalline order and deformation. This coupling leads to properties that are attractive for a number of applications in soft robotics and energy absorption. This paper is…
Exceptionally large strains can be produced in soft elastomers by the application of an electric field and the strains can be exploited for a variety of novel actuators, such as tunable lenses and tactile actuators. However, shape morphing…
Flexible photonics offers the possibility to realize wearable sensors by bridging the advantages of flexible materials and photonic sensing elements. Recently, optical resonators have emerged as a tool to improve its over sensitivity by…
To describe many-particle systems suspended in incompressible low-Reynolds-number fluids, effective hydrodynamic interactions can be introduced. Here, we consider particles embedded in elastic media. The effective elastic interactions…
Metamaterials provide exceptional control over physical phenomena, enabling many disruptive technologies. However, researches in hydrodynamic meta-devices have mainly used intrusive methods to manipulate material structures, limited by…
With the increasing demand for personalized health monitoring, wearable sensors have gained attention in medical diagnostics and physiological tracking. Hydrogels, known for their mechanical properties and similarity to biological tissues,…
The present work presents a density-functional microscopic model of soft biological tissue. The model was based on a prototype molecular structure from experimentally resolved collagen peptide residues and water clusters and has the…
Nematic elastomers and glasses are solids that display spontaneous distortion under external stimuli. Recent advances in the synthesis of sheets with controlled heterogeneities have enabled their actuation into non-trivial shapes with…
Finite plasticity theories are still a subject of controversy and lively discussions. Among the approaches to finite elastoplasticity two became especially popular. The first, implemented in the commercial finite element codes, is based on…
Magnetic composite materials i.e. elastomers, polymer gels, or polymer solutions with embedded magnetic nanoparticles are useful for many technical and bio-medical applications. However, the microscopic details of the coupling mechanisms…
Actuating periodically an elastic filament in a viscous liquid generally breaks the constraints of Purcell's scallop theorem, resulting in the generation of a net propulsive force. This observation suggests a method to design simple…
Hydrogels have a distinct combination of mechanical and water-transport behaviors. As hydrogels stiffen, they become less permeable. Here, we combine semi-dilute polymer theory with the Kozeny-Carman equation to develop a simple scaling law…
Tissues are subjected to large external forces and undergo global deformations during morphogenesis. We use synthetic analogues of tissues to study the impact of cell-cell adhesion on the response of cohesive cellular assemblies under such…
Porous materials are relevant for a broad range of technologies from catalysis and filtration, to tissue engineering and lightweight structures. Controlling the porosity of these materials over multiple length scales often leads to enticing…
A continuing challenge in material science is how to create active materials in which shape changes or displacements can be generated electrically or thermally. Here we borrow principles from hydraulics, in particular that confined…
Manipulating the shape of nanoscale objects in a controllable fashion is at the heart of designing materials that act as building blocks for self-assembly or serve as targeted drug delivery carriers. Inducing shape deformations by…
Large deformations of soft elastic beads spinning at high angular velocity in a denser background fluid are investigated theoretically, numerically, and experimentally using millimeter-size polyacrylamide hydrogel particles introduced in a…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing field that spans the fields of chemistry, materials science, and engineering. Due to the diverse background of the field, there have been contrasting naming schemes such as 'intelligent', 'smart' and…
Soft, slender structures are ubiquitous in natural and engineered systems, with broad application potential from biomimetic materials to soft robotics. However, there is a notable lack of computational tools that simultaneously preserve…
Using a well defined soft model glass in the framework of Molecular Dynamics simulations, the inherent structures are probed by means of a recently developed deformation protocol that aims to capture the Dynamical Heterogeneities (DH), as…