Related papers: Creep control in soft particle packings

We investigate the conditions leading to large drag force fluctuations in granular materials. The study is based on a set of experimental drag tests, which involve pulling a plate vertically through a cohesionless granular material. In…

Random packings of granular chains are presented as a model polymer system to investigate the contribution of entanglements to strain-stiffening in the absence of Brownian motion. The chain packings are sheared in triaxial compression…

Predicting the mechanical response of the soft gel materials under external deformation is of paramount importance in many areas, such as foods, pharmaceuticals, solid-liquid separations, cosmetics, aerogels and drug delivery. Most of the…

Using numerical simulations, we study the dynamical evolution of particles interacting via competing long-range repulsion and short-range attraction in two dimensions. The particles are compressed using a time-dependent quasi-one…

Liquid drops slide more slowly over soft, deformable substrates than over rigid solids. This phenomenon can be attributed to the viscoelastic dissipation induced by the moving wetting ridge, which inhibits a rapid motion, and is called…

We present measurements of the stress response of packings formed from a wide range of particle shapes. Besides spheres these include convex shapes such as the Platonic solids, truncated tetrahedra, and triangular bipyramids, as well as…

Granular packings of non-convex or elongated particles can form free-standing structures like walls or arches. For some particle shapes, such as staples, the rigidity arises from interlocking of pairs of particles, but the origins of…

Confined thin structures are ubiquitous in nature. Spatial and length constraints have led to a number of novel packing strategies at both the micro-scale, as when DNA packages inside a capsid, and the macro-scale, seen in plant root…

Stress-strain relations for random packings of entangling chains under triaxial compression can exhibit strain stiffening and sustain stresses several orders-of-magnitude beyond typical granular materials. X-ray tomography reveals the…

The flow behavior of granular matter is significantly influenced by the shape of constituent particles. This effect is particularly pronounced for very concave particles, which exhibit unique flow characteristics such as higher porosity and…

We investigate confined shear thickening suspensions for which the sample thickness is comparable to the particle dimensions. Rheometry measurements are presented for densely packed suspensions of spheres and rods with aspect ratios 6 and…

Understanding the mechanical instabilities of two-dimensional membranes has strong connection to the subjects of structure instabilities, morphology control and materials failures. In this work, we investigate the plastic mechanism…

While recent efforts have shown how local structure plays an essential role in the dynamic heterogeneity of homogeneous glass-forming materials, systems containing interfaces such as thin films or composite materials remain poorly…

Herein, we numerically study the rheology of a two-dimensional frictional granular system confined by constant pressure under oscillatory shear. Several scaling laws for the storage and loss moduli against the scaled strain amplitude have…

The stress profile and reorientation of grains, in response to a point force applied to a preloaded two dimensional granular system, are calculated in the context of a continuum theory that incorporates the texture of the packing. When high…

Cohesive granular materials such as wet sand, snow, and powders can flow like a viscous liquid. However, the elementary mechanisms of momentum transport in such athermal particulate fluids are elusive. As a result, existing models for…

Granular materials densify under repeated mechanical perturbations, a nonequilibrium dynamics that underlies many natural and industrial processes. Because granular relaxation is governed by frictional contacts and energy dissipation, this…

Biomaterials such as protein or polysaccharide gels are known to behave qualitatively as soft solids and to rupture under an external load. Combining optical and ultrasonic imaging to shear rheology we show that the failure scenario of a…

Brush-like structures emerge from stretching of long polymer chains, densely grafted on to the surface of an impermeable substrate. They arise due to the competition between conformational entropic elasticity of polymer chains and excluded…

The viscoplastic deformation (creep) of crystalline materials under constant stress involves the motion of a large number of interacting dislocations. Analytical methods and sophisticated `dislocation-dynamics' simulations have proved very…