Related papers: Elasticity tunes mechanical stress localization ar…
The natural impedance, or dynamic relationship between force and motion, of a human operator can determine the stability of exoskeletons that use interaction-torque feedback to amplify human strength. While human impedance is typically…
Long range order and symmetry in heterogeneous materials architected on crystal lattices lead to elastic and inelastic anisotropies and thus limit mechanical functionalities in particular crystallographic directions. Here, we present a…
Advancements in modern semiconductor devices increasingly depend on the utilization of amorphous materials and the reduction of material thickness, pushing the boundaries of their physical capabilities. The mechanical properties of these…
In this work, we systematically investigate for the first time the nature of stress correlations in soft colloidal gel materials which support tensile and compressive forces as well as finite rolling torque, as a function of system…
Organogenesis involves large deformations and complex shape changes that require elaborate mechanical regulation. Models of tissue biomechanics have been introduced to account for the coupling between mechanical response and biochemical…
Topology optimization (TO) is a well-established methodology for structural design under user-defined constraints, e.g. minimum volume and maximum stiffness. However, such methods have traditionally been applied to static, deterministic…
Mechanical amorphization, a widely observed phenomenon, has been utilized to synthesize novel phases by inducing disorder through external loading, thereby expanding the realm of glass-forming systems. Empirically, it has been plausible…
Mechanical stresses in soft materials across different length scales play a fundamental role in understanding the function of biological systems and in the use of artificial materials for engineering soft machines and biomedical devices.…
Elastoplastic lattice models for the response of solids to deformation typically incorporate structure only implicitly via a local yield strain that is assigned to each site. However, the local yield strain can change in response to a…
The complexity of the frictional dynamics at the microscopic scale makes difficult to identify all of its controlling parameters. Indeed, experiments on sheared elastic bodies have shown that the static friction coefficient depends on…
The recent finding of collective actuation in active solids, namely solids embedded with active units, opens the path towards multifunctional materials with genuine autonomy. In such systems, collective dynamics emerge spontaneously and…
We study the competition between thermal fluctuations and stress enhancement in the failure process of a disordered system by using a local load sharing fiber bundle model. The thermal noise is introduced by defining a failure probability…
Soft biological tissues exhibit a tendency to maintain a preferred state of tensile stress, known as tensional homeostasis, which is restored even after external mechanical stimuli. This macroscopic behavior can be described using the…
Topological defects are one of the most conspicuous features of liquid crystals. In two dimensional nematics, they have been shown to behave effectively as particles with both, charge and orientation, which dictate their interactions. Here,…
External stress can accelerate molecular mobility of amorphous solids by several orders of magnitude. The changes in mobility are commonly interpreted through the Eyring model, which invokes an empirical activation volume whose origin…
Spatial heterogeneity in the elastic properties of soft random solids is investigated via a two-pronged approach. First, a nonlocal phenomenological model for the elastic free energy is examined. This features a quenched random kernel,…
We propose a protocol to model accurately the electromechanical behavior of dielectric elastomer membranes using experimental data of stress-stretch and voltage-stretch tests. We show how the relationship between electric displacement and…
In liquid-crystalline elastomers, the nematic order parameter and the induced strain vary smoothly across the isotropic-nematic transition, without the expected first-order discontinuity. To investigate this smooth variation, we measure the…
When discretizing symmetric stress tensors in variational problems arising in continuum mechanics, one has to choose how to enforce the symmetry of the stress tensor: (i) strongly by requiring the discrete tensors to be pointwise symmetric…
Growing experimental evidence indicates that topological defects could serve as organizing centers in the morphogenesis of tissues. Here, we provide a quantitative explanation for this phenomenon, rooted in the buckling theory of deformable…