Related papers: Interplay of gross and fine structures in strongly…
Many objects in nature and industry are wrapped in a thin sheet to enhance their chemical, mechanical, or optical properties. There are similarly a variety of methods for wrapping, from pressing a film onto a hard substrate, to using…
Thin elastic solids are easily deformed into a myriad of three-dimensional shapes, which may contain sharp localized structures as in a crumpled candy wrapper, or have smooth and diffuse features like the undulating edge of a flower.…
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…
When a thin sheet is crushed into a small three-dimensional volume, it invariably forms a structure with a low volume fraction but high resistance to further compression. Being a far-from-equilibrium process, forced crumpling is not…
Predicting the large-amplitude deformations of thin elastic sheets is difficult due to the complications of self-contact, geometric nonlinearities, and a multitude of low-lying energy states. We study a simple two-dimensional setting where…
Recent experiments have imposed controlled swelling patterns on thin polymer films, which subsequently buckle into three-dimensional shapes. We develop a solution to the design problem suggested by such systems, namely, if and how one can…
I study numerically the problem of delamination of a thin film elastically attached to a rigid substrate. A nominally flat elastic thin film is modeled using a two-dimensional triangular mesh. Both compression and bending rigidities are…
Wrinkling is the phenomenon of out-of-plane deformation patterns in thin walled structures, as a result of a local compressive (internal) loads in combination with a large membrane stiffness and a small but non-zero bending stiffness.…
Complex textured surfaces occur in nature and industry, from fingerprints to lithography-based micropatterns. Wrinkling by confinement to an incompatible substrate is an attractive way of generating reconfigurable patterned topographies,…
The shape of materials is often subject to a number of geometric constraints that limit the size of the system or fix the structure of its boundary. In soft and biological materials, however, these constraints are not always hard, but are…
We report simulation results on melts of entangled linear polymers confined in a free-standing thin film. We study how the geometric constraints imposed by the confinement alter the entanglement state of the system compared to the…
The mechanism by which a patterned state accommodates the breaking of translational symmetry by a phase boundary or a sample wall has been addressed in the context of Landau branching in type-I superconductors, refinement of magnetic…
Thin sheets that are forced at their boundaries develop a variety of shapes aimed at minimising elastic energy by curving spontaneously in ways that break the symmetry of the sheet and the forcing. Characterising such buckling generally…
Equilibration of polymer melts containing highly entangled long polymer chains in confinement or with free surfaces is a challenge for computer simulations. We approach this problem by first studying polymer melts based on the soft-sphere…
We report molecular dynamics simulation results on the equilibrium properties of polymer thin films adsorbed onto flat and curved substrates. We first systematically determine the contact angle of polymer droplets on flat substrates as a…
Numerical simulations of thin sheets undergoing large deformations are computationally challenging. Depending on the scenario, they may spontaneously buckle, wrinkle, fold, or crumple. Nature's thin tissues often experience significant…
A detailed formulation for the effects of the surface integrity, i.e. surface topography, surface metallurgy, and surface mechanical properties, on the mechanics of ultra-thin films is proposed in the framework of linear elasticity. In this…
The statistical-physical study of granular matter is essential to understand, from a fundamental point of view, the many different phenomena emerging in these classical many-body systems. Under rapid-flow conditions, granular materials…
The article addresses the mathematical modeling of the folding of a thin elastic sheet along a prescribed curved arc. A rigorous model reduction from a general hyperelastic material description is carried out under appropriate scaling…
Recent simulation studies of the surface tension, and other properties of thin free-standing films, have revealed unexpected finite size effects in which the variance of the properties vary monotonically with the in-plane width of the…