Related papers: Polycrystallinity enhances stress build-up around …
We investigate experimentally the formation of the particular ice structure obtained when a capillary trickle of water flows on a cold substrate. We show that after a few minutes the water ends up flowing on a tiny ice wall whose shape is…
The existence of a well defined yield stress, where a macroscopic piece of crystal begins to plastically flow, has been one of the basic observations of materials science. In contrast to macroscopic samples, in micro- and nanocrystals the…
The response to a localized force provides a sensitive test for different models of stress transmission in granular solids. The elasto-plastic models traditionally used by engineers have been challenged by theoretical and experimental…
The structural dynamics of ice in the freezing - thawing process has been studied in the context of the concept of two-phase water. It was previously shown that water is a two-phase system consisting of free and bound (liquid crystal)…
Collisions between sintered icy dust aggregates are numerically simulated. If the temperature of an icy aggregate is sufficiently high, sintering promotes molecular transport and a neck between adjacent grains grows. This growth changes the…
The mechanical, structural and functional properties of crystals are determined by their defects and the distribution of stresses surrounding these defects has broad implications for the understanding of transport phenomena. When the defect…
The proneness of water to crystallize is a major obstacle to understanding its putative exotic behavior in the supercooled state. It also represents a strong practical limitation to cryopreservation of biological systems. Adding some…
The effect of tensile stress applied during cooling of binary glasses on the potential energy states and mechanical properties is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We study the three-dimensional binary mixture that was…
Context. The level of porosity of interstellar ices - largely comprised of amorphous solid water (ASW) - contains clues on the trapping capacity of other volatile species and determines the surface accessibility that is needed for solid…
We design, fabricate and test heterogeneous architected polycrystals, composed of hard plastomers and soft elastomers, which thus show outstanding mechanical resilience and energy dissipation simultaneously. Grain boundaries that separate…
The ice surface softening during friction is shown as a result of spontaneous appearance of shear strain caused by external supercritical heating. This transformation is described by the Kelvin-Voigt equation for viscoelastic medium, by the…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
Flow through porous media can reshape the medium through erosion and deposition, producing preferential flow channels across a wide range of natural and industrial systems. Yet the mechanisms by which spatial disorder triggers…
Heterogeneous ice growth exhibits a maximum in freezing rate arising from the competition between kinetics and the thermodynamic driving force between the solid and liquid states. Here, we use molecular dynamics simulations to elucidate the…
This theoretical and numerical study investigates the impact of electrostatic stresses on the shape of charged water structures (grains) in weakly ionized plasmas. We developed an analytic model to predict the conditions under which a grain…
Attractive colloidal particles can form a disordered elastic solid or gel when quenched into a two-phase region, if the volume fraction is sufficiently large. When the interactions are comparable to thermal energies the stress-bearing…
A central question concerning glass-formation has been what governs the kinetic arrest of the quenched liquid - cooling reduces the thermal energy which molecules need to surmount local potential barriers, while the accompanying volume…
The formation of helium cavities in coarse-grained materials produces hardening proportional to the number density and size of the cavities and due to the interaction of dislocations with intragranular helium defects. In nanostructured…
We use X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) to probe the dynamics of colloidal particles in polycrystalline ice. During freezing, the dendritic ice morphology and rejection of particles from the ice created regions of…
Any material in thermal equilibrium exhibits fundamental thermodynamic fluctuations of its mechanical and optical properties. Such thermodynamic fluctuations of length, elastic constants, and refractive index of amorphous materials -- like…