Related papers: Topographic De-adhesion in the Viscoelastic Limit
Morphogenesis emerges from dynamic feedback among geometry, mechanics, and chemistry; however, disentangling these contributions in living systems remains challenging. Here, we focus on the interplay between geometry and mechanics by…
Dielectric elastomers (DEs) are a type of multifunctional materials with salient features that are very attractive in developing soft, lightweight, and small-scale transducers and robotics. This paper reviews the mechanics of soft DE…
Legged robot locomotion is hindered by a mismatch between applications where legs can outperform wheels or treads, most of which feature deformable substrates, and existing tools for planning and control, most of which assume flat, rigid…
Water near hydrophobic surfaces is like that at a liquid-vapor interface, where fluctuations in water density are substantially enhanced compared to that in bulk water. Here we use molecular simulations with specialized sampling techniques…
We investigate a minimal model of the plastic deformation of amorphous materials. The material elements are assumed to exhibit ideally plastic behavior (J2 plasticity). Structural disorder is considered in terms of random variations of the…
We study numerically the depinning transition of driven elastic interfaces in a random-periodic medium with localized periodic-correlation peaks in the direction of motion. The analysis of the moving interface geometry reveals the existence…
We show that a viscoelastic thin sheet driven out of equilibrium by active structural remodelling develops a rich variety of shapes as a result of a competition between viscous relaxation and activity. In the regime where active processes…
The past few years have witnessed the rapid development of liquid metal dealloying to fabricate nano-/meso-scale porous and composite structures with ultra-high interfacial area for diverse materials applications. However, this method…
Mechanochemical processes on surfaces such as the cellular cortex or epithelial sheets, play a key role in determining patterns and shape changes of biological systems. To understand the complex interplay of hydrodynamics and material flows…
While elastic metasurfaces offer a remarkable and very effective approach to the subwalength control of stress waves, their use in practical applications is severely hindered by intrinsically narrow band performance. This work introduces…
Icy satellites host topography at many length scales, from rifts and craters on the small end to equatorial-pole shell thickness differences that are comparable to these bodies' circumference. The rate of topographic evolution depends on…
This work presents a new modeling approach to macroscopic, polycrystalline elasto-plasticity starting from first principles and a few well-defined structural assumptions, incorporating the mildly rate-dependent (viscous) nature of plastic…
Direct comparison is made of the steady-sates and coarsening dynamics in a local system and its nonlocal generalization. The example system is the surface of a solid film in a strong electric field; the morphological evolution of the…
Soft elastic filaments that can be stretched, bent and twisted exhibit a range of topologically and geometrically complex morphologies that include plectonemes, solenoids, knot-like and braid-like structures. We combine numerical…
Many complex structures and stochastic patterns emerge from simple kinetic rules and local interactions, and are governed by scale invariance properties in combination with effects of the global geometry. We consider systems that can be…
Amorphous solids relax via slow molecular rearrangement induced by thermal fluctuations or applied stress. Although microscopic structural signatures predicting these structural relaxations have long been sought, a physically motivated…
Engineering wear models are generally empirical and lack connections to the physical processes of debris generation at the nanoscale to microscale. Here, we thus analyze wear particle formation for sliding interfaces in dry contact with…
The deformation mechanism in amorphous solids subjected to external shear remains poorly understood because of the absence of well-defined topological defects mediating the plastic deformation. The notion of soft spots has emerged as a…
Contact mechanics-based models for the friction of nominally flat rough surfaces have not been able to adequately capture certain key experimentally observed phenomenona, such as the transition from a static friction peak to a lower level…
Hierarchical structures are very common in Nature, but only recently have they been systematically studied in materials physics, in order to understand the specific effects they can have on the mechanical properties of various systems.…