Related papers: Soft coring: how to get a clarinet out of a flute?
The "Tete de moine" Swiss cheese is generally served by scraping the surface of a cylindrical loaf with a sharp tool. This produces thin sheets of cheese that are strongly wrinkled at the edge, resembling frilly flowers and enhancing the…
Tearing a thin sheet by forcing a rigid object through it leads to complex crack morphologies; a single oscillatory crack arises when a tool is driven laterally through a brittle sheet, while two diverging cracks and a series of…
Cutting mechanics in soft solids have been a subject of study for several decades, an interest fuelled by the multitude of its applications, including material testing, manufacturing, and biomedical technology. Wire cutting is the simplest…
Cutting soft materials is a complex process governed by the interplay of bulk large deformation, interfacial soft fracture, and contact forces with the cutting tool. Existing experimental characterizations and numerical models often fail to…
Cutting mechanics of soft solids is gaining rapid attention thanks to its promising benefits in material characterization and other applications. However, a full understanding of the physical phenomena is still missing, and several…
The tone hole geometry of a clarinet is optimized numerically. The instrument is modeled as a network of one dimensional transmission line elements. For each (non-fork) fingering, we first calculate the resonance frequencies of the input…
It is well known that jammed soft materials will flow if sheared above their yield stress - think mayonnaise spread on bread - but a complete microscopic description of this seemingly sim- ple process has yet to emerge. What remains elusive…
Fractal surfaces ('patchwork quilts') are shown to arise under most general circumstances involving simple bitwise operations between real numbers. A theory is presented for all deterministic bitwise operations on a finite alphabet. It is…
Dicing soft solids with a sharp knife is quicker and smoother if the blade is sliding rapidly parallel to its edge in addition to the normal squeezing motion. We explain this common observation with a consistent theory suited for soft gels…
The remarkable range of biological forms in and around us, such as the undulating shape of a leaf or flower in the garden, the coils in our gut, or the folds in our brain, raise a number of questions at the interface of biology, physics and…
Due to their microstructure, quasi brittle materials present rough cracks. Under sliding of the crack lips, this roughness involves in one hand induced opening and in the other hand some apparent plasticity which is due to the interlocking…
Thin sheets respond to confinement by smoothly wrinkling, or by focusing stress into small, sharp regions. From engineering to biology, geology, textiles, and art, thin sheets are packed and confined in a wide variety of ways, and yet…
In soft matter systems the local displacement field can be accessed directly by video microscopy enabling one to compute local strain fields and hence the elastic moduli using a coarse-graining procedure. We study this process for a simple…
`Soft' high-energy interactions are clearly important in pp collisions. Indeed, these events are dominant by many orders of magnitude, and about 40% are of diffractive origin; that is, due to elastic scattering or proton dissociation.…
Biopsy sampling relies on hollow needles that puncture soft tissues by propagating and opening a cylindrical crack, yet the mechanics governing this coring process remain only partially understood. Motivated by this gap, we develop a…
The accurate measurement of fracture resistance in elastomers is essential for predicting the mechanical limits of soft devices. Usually, this is achieved by performing tearing or peeling experiments on thin-sheet samples. Here, we show…
The diverse chemical and physical reactions encountered during cooking connect us to science every day. Here, we theoretically and experimentally investigate the swelling and softening of pasta due to liquid imbibition, as well as the…
We make a systematic study of the focal surface of a congruence of lines in the projective space. Using differential techniques together with techniques from intersection theory, we reobtain in particular all the invariants of the focal…
We theoretically study the frictional damping of a small probe object on a coated planar surface, analyzing the resulting phonon modes via a theory of viscoelasticity. Three different types of excitations are found to contribute to friction…
Employing theory and numerical simulations, we demonstrate discontinuous force thinning due to the motion of an external probe in a host medium, which we approximate as structureless. When the driving of the probe exceeds a critical force,…