Related papers: Size effects in micro and nanoscale materials frac…
Cellular elastomeric metamaterials are interesting for various applications, e.g. soft robotics, as they may exhibit multiple microstructural pattern transformations, each with its characteristic mechanical behavior. Numerical literature…
To facilitate the design and optimization of nanomaterials for a given application it is necessary to understand the relationship between structure and physical properties. For large nanomaterials, there is imprecise structural information…
The fracture of highly deformable soft materials is of great practical importance in a wide range of technological applications, emerging in fields such as soft robotics, stretchable electronics and tissue engineering. From a basic physics…
The mechanical properties of soft materials can be probed on small length scales by various microrheology methods. A common approach tracks fluctuations of micrometer-sized beads embedded in the medium to be characterized. This approach…
Pristine monocrystalline graphene is claimed to be the strongest material known with remarkable mechanical and electrical properties. However, graphene made with scalable fabrication techniques is polycrystalline and contains inherent…
We study experimentally the slow growth of a single crack in a fibrous material and observe stepwise growth dynamics. We model the material as a lattice where the crack is pinned by elastic traps and grows due to thermally activated stress…
A theory for the prediction of the size dependence of torsional rigidities of nanosized structural elements is developed. It is shown that, to a very good approximation, the torsional rigidity (D) of a nanosized bar differs from the…
Attracted by the importance of new materials in nanotechnology area, this thesis develops this research field while deepening results. We started by introducing the more sophisticated simulation and calculation methods, such as the Monte…
Quantifying the population of nanoscale defects that are formed in metals and alloys exposed to extreme radiation environments remains a pressing challenge in materials science. These defects both fundamentally alter material properties and…
The goal of this PhD thesis was to characterize the properties of friction in nanotubes and from a more general point of view the understanding of the microscopic origin of friction. Indeed, the relative simplicity of the system allows us…
Guided by recent advances in the understanding of nucleation and propagation of fracture in elastic brittle materials, this paper proposes a suite of three simple experiments that permit the measurement of the three macroscopic material…
Macroscopic fibres of carbon nanotubes are hierarchical structures combining long building blocks preferentially oriented along the fibre axis and a large porosity arising from the imperfect packing of bundles. Synchrotron small-angle X-ray…
Unlike macroscopic multistable mechanical systems such as snap bracelets or elastic shells that must be physically manipulated into various conformations, microscopic systems can undergo spontaneous conformation switching between…
The nanophysics is halfway between the size scales of quantum mechanics and macroscopic physics governed by the laws of Newton and Einstein. The correct definition of nanophysics is the physics of structures and artefacts with dimensions in…
We review the present status of our research and understanding regarding the dynamics and the statistical properties of earthquakes, mainly from a statistical physical viewpoint. Emphasis is put both on the physics of friction and fracture,…
The incredible thermo-mechanical properties of biological materials arise from the microscopic scale due to a complex hierarchical mechanism, regulated by microinstabilities at the molecular level. The description of such complex structures…
Over the past two decades polymer nanocomposites have received tremendous interest from industry and academia due to their advanced properties comparative to polymer blends. Many computational studies have revealed that the macroscopic…
Fracture is a fundamental mechanism of materials failure. Propagating cracks can exhibit a rich dynamical behavior controlled by a subtle interplay between microscopic failure processes in the crack tip region and macroscopic elasticity. We…
Analytical models have been developed for fracture propagation over the last several decades and are now considered with renewed interest; the range of their applicability varies for different materials and different loading conditions.…
Nanoindentation is a powerful tool capable of providing fundamental insights of material elastic and plastic response at the nanoscale. Alloys at nanoscale are particularly interesting as the local heterogeneity and deformation mechanism…