Related papers: Bioinspired rational design of multi-material 3D p…
Vertebrate animals benefit from a combination of rigidity for structural support and softness for adaptation. Similarly, integrating rigidity and softness can enhance the versatility of soft robotics. However, the challenges associated with…
Throughout biology, hierarchy is a recurrent theme in the geometry of structures where strength is achieved with minimal use of material. Acting over vast timescales, evolution has brought about beautiful solutions to problems of…
In many biological materials such as nacre and bone, the material structure consists of hard grains and soft interfaces, with the interfaces playing a significant role in the material's mechanical behavior. This type of structures has been…
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…
The design of complex materials and the formation of specific patterns often arise from the properties of the individual building blocks. In this respect, colloidal systems offer a unique opportunity because nowadays they can be synthesized…
Soft and biological matter come in a variety of shapes and geometries. When soft surfaces that do not fit into each other due to a mismatch in Gaussian curvatures form an interface, beautiful geometry-induced patterns emerge. In this paper,…
As soft robot design matures, researchers have converged to sophisticated design paradigms to enable the development of more suitable platforms. Two such paradigms are soft-rigid hybrid robots, which utilize rigid structural materials in…
The structural complexity of metamaterials is limitless, although in practice, most designs comprise periodic architectures which lead to materials with spatially homogeneous features. More advanced tasks, arising in e.g. soft robotics,…
Microgels are soft colloidal particles constituted by cross-linked polymer networks with a high potential for applications. In particular, after adsorption at a fluid interface, interfacial tension provides two-dimensional (2D) confinement…
Three-dimensional (3D) printing of bioelectronics offers a versatile platform for fabricating personalized and structurally integrated electronic systems within biological scaffolds. Biodegradable electronics, which naturally dissolve after…
Soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions, and biological systems, are typically multicomponent mixtures of macromolecules and simpler components (e.g., microions, monomers, solvent) that can assemble into complex…
A plethora of two-dimensional (2D) materials entered the physics and engineering scene in the last two decades. Their robust, membrane-like sheet permit -- mostly require -- deposition, giving rise to solid-solid dry interfaces whose bodily…
Multi-material lightweight designs, e.g. the combination of aluminum with fiber-reinforced composites, are a key feature for the development of innovative and resource-efficient products. The connection properties of such bi-material…
Magnetic soft robots embedded with hard magnetic particles enable untethered actuation via external magnetic fields, offering remote, rapid, and precise control, which is highly promising for biomedical applications. However, designing such…
Emerging multi-material 3D printing techniques have paved the way for the rational design of metamaterials with not only complex geometries but also arbitrary distributions of multiple materials within those geometries. Varying the spatial…
Interfaces such as grain boundaries in polycrystalline as well as heterointerfaces in multiphase solids are ubiquitous in materials science and engineering. Far from being featureless dividing surfaces between neighboring crystals,…
Triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) metamaterials characterized by mathematically-controlled topologies exhibit better mechanical properties compared to uniform structures. The unit cell topology of such metamaterials can be further…
How can dense biological tissue maintain sharp boundaries between coexisting cell populations? We explore this question within a simple vertex model for cells, focusing on the role of topology and tissue surface tension. We show that the…
Bio-inspired composites are a great promise for mimicking the extraordinary and highly efficient properties of natural materials. Recent developments in voxel-by-voxel 3D printing have enabled extreme levels of control over the material…
The ability to tune electronic structure in twisted stacks of two-dimensional (2D) materials has motivated the exploration of similar moir\'e physics with twisted oxide membranes. Due to the intrinsic three-dimensional nature of bonding in…