Related papers: Detachment of a rigid flat punch from a viscoelast…
When a crack propagate in a viscoelastic solid energy dissipation can occur very far from the crack tip where the stress field may be very different from the $r^{-1/2}$ singular form expected close to the crack tip. Most theories of crack…
Soft yet tough materials are ubiquitous in nature and everyday life. The ratio between fracture toughness and intrinsic fracture energy of a soft material defines its toughness enhancement. Soft materials' toughness enhancement has been…
This study presents the spreading of a single filament of a yield stress (viscoplastic) fluid extruded onto a pre-wetted solid surface. The filaments spread laterally under surface tension forces until they reach a final equilibrium shape…
Using a thermodynamical approach, we calculate the deformation of a spherical elastic particle placed on a rigid substrate, under zero external load, and including an ingredient of importance in soft matter: the interfacial tension of the…
Lubrication flows appear in many applications in engineering, biophysics, and in nature. Separation of surfaces and minimisation of friction and wear is achieved when the lubrication fluid builds up a lift force. In this paper we analyse…
We investigate the structure and mechanical behavior of assemblies of frictionless, nearly rigid equal-sized beads, in the quasistatic limit, by numerical simulation. Three different loading paths are explored: triaxial compression,…
We investigate the possibility to determine the divergence-free displacement $\mathbf{u}$ \emph{independently} from the pressure reaction $p$ for a class of boundary value problems in incompressible linear elasticity. If not possible, we…
We investigate crack propagation in a simple two-dimensional visco-elastic model and find a scaling regime in the relation between the propagation velocity and energy release rate or fracture energy, together with lower and upper bounds of…
We study the average separation between an elastic solid and a hard solid with a nominal flat but randomly rough surface, as a function of the squeezing pressure. We present experimental results for a silicon rubber (PDMS) block with a flat…
We study the properties of strain bursts (dislocation avalanches) occurring in two-dimensional discrete dislocation dynamics models under quasistatic stress-controlled loading. Contrary to previous suggestions, the avalanche statistics…
A two-dimensional easy-plane ferromagnetic substrate, interacting with a dipolar tip which is magnetised perpendicular with respect to the easy plane is studied numerically by solving the Landau-Lifshitz Gilbert equation. The dipolar tip…
We study the dynamics of a kink in a one-lane asymmetric simple exclusion process with detachment and attachment of the particle at arbitrary sites. For a system with one site of detachment and attachment we find that the kink is trapped by…
When a polymer solution is uniaxially stretched and held fixed at both ends, the solution quickly separates into droplets connected by strings and takes the beads-on-string structure. The string then becomes thinner by capillary forces.…
In this paper we analyze a system for brittle delamination between two visco-elastic bodies, also subject to inertia, which can be interpreted as a model for dynamic fracture. The rate-independent flow rule for the delamination parameter is…
In viscoelastic materials, individually short-lived bonds collectively result in a mechanical resistance which is long-lived but finite, as ultimately cracks appear. Here we provide a microscopic mechanism by which cracks emerge from the…
The effects of viscoelasticity have been shown to manifest themselves via symmetry breaking. In this investigation, we show a novel phenomenon that arises from this idea. We observe that when a dense sphere is rotated near a wall (the…
The formation of drops of a complex fluid, for instance including dissolved polymers and/or solid particles, has practical implications in several industrial and biophysical processes. In this Letter, we experimentally investigate the…
We study the bending of a book-like system, comprising a stack of elastic plates coupled through friction. The behavior of this layered system is rich and nontrivial, with a non-additive enhancement of the apparent stiffness and a…
The efficiency of soft particles to stabilize emulsions is examined by measuring their desorption free energy, i.e., the mechanical work required to detach the particle from a fluid interface. Here, we consider rubber-like elastic as well…
It is shown that the dynamics of a two-dimensional crystal with a finite concentration of dislocations, as well as vacancy and interstitial defects, is governed by the hydrodynamic equations of a viscoelastic medium. At the longest length…