Related papers: Tessellated granular metamaterials with tunable el…
Athermal elastic moduli of soft sphere packings are known to exhibit universal scaling properties near the unjamming point, most notably the vanishing of the shear-to-bulk moduli ratio $G/B$ upon decompression. Interestingly, the smallness…
Very recently, the construction of twist actuators from magnetorheological gels and elastomers has been suggested. These materials consist of magnetizable colloidal particles embedded in a soft elastic polymeric environment. The twist…
Layers obtained by drying a colloidal dispersion of silica spheres are found to be a good benchmark to test the elastic behaviour of porous media, in the challenging case of high porosities and nano-sized microstructures. Classically used…
Disordered hyperuniform packings are unusual amorphous states of two-phase materials that are endowed with exotic physical properties. Such hyperuniform systems are characterized by an anomalous suppression of volume-fraction fluctuations…
Dispersed colloidal particles within a suspension can aggregate and spontaneously self-organize into a robust, percolating structure known as a gel. These network-like structures are prevalent in nature and play a critical role in many…
We present a numerical analysis of the effect of particle elongation on the quasistatic behavior of sheared granular media by means of the Contact Dynamics method. The particle shapes are rounded-cap rectangles characterized by their…
Relations between static and dynamic viscoelastic responses in gels can be very elucidating and may provide useful tools to study the behavior of bio-materials such as protein hydrogels. An important example comes from the viscoelasticity…
We study by means of molecular dynamics simulations of periodic shear cells, the influence of particle shape on the global mechanical behavior of dense granular media. Results at macro-mechanical level show that for large shear deformation…
We investigate the influence of particle stiffness on the grasping performance of granular grippers, a class of soft robotic effectors that utilize granular jamming for object manipulation. Through experimental analyses and X-ray imaging,…
Granular materials are involved in most industrial and environmental processes, as well as many civil engineering applications. Although significant advances have been made in understanding the statics and dynamics of cohesionless grains…
Tightly packed granular particles under shear often exhibit intriguing intermittencies, specifically, sudden stress drops that we refer to as quaking. To probe the nature of this phenomenon, we prototype a circular shear cell that is…
Biological membranes are able to exhibit various morphology due to the fluidity of the lipid molecules within the monolayers. The shape transformation of membranes has been well described by the classical Helfrich theory, which consists…
We exploit the controlled drying of millimeter-sized gel beads to investigate isotropic compression of colloidal fractal gels. Using a custom dynamic light scattering setup, we demonstrate that stresses imposed by drying on the bead surface…
Filler-induced strengthening is ubiquitous in materials science and is particularly well-established in polymeric nanocomposites. Despite having similar constituents, colloidal gels with solid filling exhibit distinct rheology, which is of…
The leading order "temperature" of a dense two dimensional granular material fluidised by external vibrations is determined. An asymptotic solution is obtained where the particles are considered to be elastic in the leading approximation.…
We study the response of granular materials to external stress using experiment, simulation, and theory. We derive an entropic, Ginzburg-Landau functional that enforces mechanical stability and positivity of contact forces. In this…
Bubble-based metamaterials have been extensively studied both theoretically and experimentally thanks to their simple geometry and their ability to manipulate acoustic waves. The latter is partly dependent on the structural characteristics…
We present an experimental and numerical study of a terahertz metamaterial with a nonlinear response that is controllable via the relative structural positioning of two stacked split ring resonator arrays. The first array is fabricated on…
The bulk dynamics of dense granular materials arise through a combination of particle-scale and mesoscale effects. Theoretical and numerical studies have shown that collective effects are created by particle-scale anisotropic structures…
We present a density-functional study of a binary phase-separating mixture of soft core particles immersed in a random matrix of quenched soft core particles of larger size. This is a model for a binary polymer mixture immersed in a…