Related papers: Auxetic Granular Metamaterials
Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions and liquid crystals are constituted by mesoscopic entities held together by weak forces. Their mechanical moduli are several orders of magnitude lower than those of atomic…
The flow behavior of granular matter is significantly influenced by the shape of constituent particles. This effect is particularly pronounced for very concave particles, which exhibit unique flow characteristics such as higher porosity and…
Mechanical densification of granular bodies is a process in which a loose material becomes increasingly cohesive as the applied pressure increases. A constitutive description of this process faces the formidable problem that granular and…
We test grip strength and shock absorption properties of various granular material in granular jamming robotic components. The granular material comprises a range of natural, manufactured, and 3D printed material encompassing a wide range…
Granular materials can fail through spontaneous events like earthquakes or brittle fracture. However, measurements and analytic models which forecast failure in this class of materials, while of both fundamental and practical interest,…
Understanding how granular materials respond to shear stress remains a central challenge in soft matter physics. We report direct observations of persistent granular convection in the bulk shear zones of spherical particle packings -- a…
Microstructured honeycomb materials may exhibit exotic, extreme and tailorable mechanical properties, suited for innovative technological applications in a variety of modern engineering fields. The paper is focused on analysing the…
Despite their very low surface gravities, asteroids exhibit a number of different geological processes involving granular matter. Understanding the response of this granular material subject to external forces in microgravity conditions is…
The macroscopic friction of particulate materials often weakens as the flow rate is increased, leading to potentially disastrous intermittent phenomena including earthquakes and landslides. We theoretically and numerically study this…
In granular media, the presence of even small amounts of interparticle cohesion manifests as an increase in the bulk strength and stiffness, effects that are typically associated with an increase in the average number of constraints per…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, we find an in-plane negative Poisson's ratio intrinsically existing in the graphene-based three-dimensional (3D) carbon foams (CFs) when they are compressed uniaxially. Our study shows that the negative…
We report on experiments to measure the temporal and spatial evolution of packing arrangements of anisotropic and weakly confined granular material, using high-resolution $\gamma$-ray adsorption. In these experiments, the particle…
Unconventional computing devices are increasingly of interest as they can operate in environments hostile to silicon-based electronics, or compute in ways that traditional electronics cannot. Mechanical computers, wherein information…
We consider the yielding behavior of amorphous solids under cyclic shear deformation and show that it can be mapped into a random walk in a confining potential with an absorbing boundary. The resulting dynamics is governed by the first…
We study the compaction and mobility properties of a dense granular material under weak random vibration. By putting in direct contact millimetric glass beads with piezoelectric transducers we manage to inject energy to the system in a…
Most granular packings possess shear moduli ($G$) that increase with the applied external pressure, and bulk moduli ($B$) that increase or remain constant with pressure. This paper presents "tessellated" granular metamaterials for which…
Granular metamaterials are a promising choice for the realization of mechanical computing devices. As preliminary evidence of this, we demonstrate here how to embed Boolean logic gates (AND and XOR) into a granular metamaterial by evolving…
To investigate the barrier effect of grain boundaries on the propagation of avalanche-like plasticity at the atomic-scale, we perform three-dimensional molecular dynamics simulations by using simplified polycrystal models including…
We consider materials whose mechanical integrity is the result of a jamming process. We argue that such media are generically "fragile": unable to support certain types of incremental loading without plastic rearrangement. Fragility is…
Colloidal gels are widely applied in industry due to their rheological character -- no flow takes place below the yield stress. Such property enables gels to maintain uniform distribution in practical formulations; otherwise, solid…