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Activity in nematics drives interfacial flows that lead to preferential alignment that is tangential or planar for extensile systems (pushers) and perpendicular or homeotropic for contractile ones (pullers). This alignment is known as…
The increasing availability of full-field displacement data from imaging techniques in experimental mechanics is determining a gradual shift in the paradigm of material model calibration and discovery, from using several simple-geometry…
In the field of soft dielectric elastomers, the notion electrostriction indicates the dependency of the permittivity on strain. The present paper is aimed at investigating the effects of electrostriction onto the stability behaviour of…
The collective action of actively contractile units embedded in elastic biopolymer networks plays a crucial role in regulating the network's macroscopic mechanical response. Here, we investigate how the macroscopic boundary stress in model…
A two dimensional amorphous material is modeled as an assembly of mesoscopic elemental pieces coupled together to form an elastically coherent structure. Plasticity is introduced as the existence of different minima in the energy landscape…
Physical experiments can characterize the elastic response of granular materials in terms of macroscopic state-variables, namely volume (packing) fraction and stress, while the microstructure is not accessible and thus neglected. Here, by…
The quest for wave channeling and manipulation has driven a strong research effort on topological and architected materials, capable of propagating localized electromagnetical or mechanical signals. With reference to an elastic structural…
Topology transcends boundaries that conventionally delineate physical, biological and engineering sciences. Our ability to mathematically describe topology, combined with our access to precision tracking and manipulation approaches, has…
Real-world solids, such as rocks, soft tissues, and engineering materials, are often under some form of stress. Most real materials are also, to some degree, anisotropic due to their microstructure, a characteristic often called the…
Atomically thin sheets, such as graphene, are widely used in nanotechnology. Recently they have also been used in applications including kirigami and self-folding origami, where it becomes important to understand how they respond to…
In contrast with ordinary materials, living matter drives its own motion by generating active, out-of-equilibrium internal stresses. These stresses typically originate from localized active elements embedded in an elastic medium, such as…
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,…
The structure of random sphere packings in mechanical equilibrium in prescribed stress states, as studied by molecular dynamics simulations, strongly depends on the assembling procedure. Frictionless packings in the limit of low pressure…
Confining a liquid crystal imposes topological constraints on the orientational order, allowing global control of equilibrium systems by manipulation of anchoring boundary conditions. In this article, we investigate whether a similar…
Helical ribbons arise in many biological and engineered systems, often driven by anisotropic surface stress, residual strain, and geometric or elastic mismatch between layers of a laminated composite. A full mathematical analysis is…
Manipulating topological disclination networks that arise in a symmetry-breaking phase transfor- mation in widely varied systems including anisotropic materials can potentially lead to the design of novel materials like conductive…
Understanding the relationship between micromechanics and macroscopic plastic deformation is vital for elucidating the deformation mechanism of amorphous solids, such as granular materials. In this study, we directly measure T1 events,…
Homogenization of the incremental response of grids made up of preloaded elastic rods leads to homogeneous effective continua which may suffer macroscopic instability, occurring at the same time in both the grid and the effective continuum.…
Elastic stress concentration at tips of long slender objects moving in viscoelastic fluids has been observed in numerical simulations, but despite the prevalence of flagellated motion in complex fluids in many biological functions, the…
Recent developments in topological mechanics have demonstrated the ability of Maxwell lattices to effectively focus stress along domain walls between differently polarized domains. The focusing ability can be exploited to protect the…