Related papers: Siloxane molecules: Nonlinear elastic behavior and…
Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is a glassy polymer widely used in biomedical engineering, namely in microfluidics applications. However, PDMS is known to interact with hydrophobic chemicals. This interaction is exacerbated at the scale of…
Materials with network-like microstructure, including polymers, are the backbone for many natural and human-made materials such as gels, biological tissues, metamaterials, and rubbers. Fracture processes in these networked materials are…
The present article is concerned with modelling the viscoelastic behavior of Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) in large-strain regime. Starting from the basic principles of thermodynamics, an incremental variational formulation is derived. Within…
Accuracy in the measurement of mechanical properties is essential for precision engineering and for the interrogation of composition-property relationships. Conventional methods of mechanical testing, such as uniaxial tension, compression,…
A micromechanically motivated phase-field damage model is proposed to investigate the fracture behaviour in crosslinked polyurethane adhesive. The crosslinked polyurethane adhesive typically show viscoelastic behaviour with geometric…
Soft polymers are ubiquitous materials in nature and as engineering materials with properties varying from rate-independent to rate-dependent. Current fracture toughness measures are non-unique for rate-dependent soft materials for varying…
Capturing the dynamics of granular flows at intermediate length scales can often be difficult. We propose studying the dynamics of contact networks as a new tool to study fracture at intermediate scales. Using experimental three-dimensional…
The presence and evolution of defects that appear in the manufacturing process play a vital role in the failure mechanisms of engineering materials. In particular, the collective behavior of dislocation dynamics at the mesoscale leads to…
We study the friction of a poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) rubber network sliding, at low velocity, on a substrate on which PDMS chains are end-tethered. We thus clearly evidence the contribution to friction of the pull-out mechanism of…
Materials are often heterogeneous at various length scales, with variations in grain structure, defects, and composition which has a strong influence on the emergent macroscopic plastic behavior. In particular, heterogeneities lead to…
The shapes of liquid polystyrene (PS) droplets on viscoelastic polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrates are investigated experimentally using atomic force microscopy for a range of droplet sizes and substrate elasticities. These shapes, which…
Elastomeric materials display a complicated set of stretchability and fracture properties that strongly depend on the flaw size, which has long been of interest to engineers and materials scientists. Here, we combine experiments and…
Disorder and long-range interactions are two of the key components that make material failure an interesting playfield for the application of statistical mechanics. The cornerstone in this respect has been lattice models of the fracture in…
Silicene, a 2D analogue of graphene, has spurred a tremendous research interest in the scientific community for its unique properties essential for next generation electronic devices. In this work, for the first time, we present a molecular…
The failure of materials and interfaces is mediated by cracks, nearly singular dissipative structures that propagate at velocities approaching the speed of sound. Crack initiation and subsequent propagation -- the dynamic process of…
We discuss the threshold activated extremal dynamics that is prevalent in the breakdown processes in heterogeneous materials. We model such systems by an elastic spring network with random breaking thresholds assigned to the springs.…
The elasticity of disordered and polydisperse polymer networks is a fundamental problem of soft matter physics that is still open. Here, we self-assemble polymer networks via simulations of a mixture of bivalent and tri- or tetravalent…
Dislocations are the carriers of plasticity in crystalline materials. Their collective interaction behavior is dependent on the strain rate and sample size. In small specimens, details of the nucleation process are of particular importance.…
Differential shrinkage in particulate quasi-brittle materials causes microcracking which reduces durability in these materials by increasing their mass transport properties. A hydro-mechanical three-dimensional periodic network approach was…
The transport of solvent molecules through soft, swollen networks is critical in both natural and engineered systems. While this poroelastic flow has traditionally been explored in networks where the mesh size is comparable to the solvent…