Related papers: Confinement controls the creep rate in soft granul…
The way granular materials response to an applied shear stress is of the utmost relevance to both human activities and natural environment. One of the their most intriguing and less understood behavior, is the stick-instability, whose most…
The rotational diffusion of a rigid spherical body decorated with dimers in an explicit fluid environment is reported. This model acts as a simplified representation of an enveloped virus bearing peplomers immersed in a coarse-grained…
We study numerically how multiple deformable capsules squeeze into a constriction. This situation is largely encountered in microfluidic chips designed to manipulate living cells, which are soft entities. We use fully three-dimensional…
A hydrostatically stressed soft elastic film circumvents the imposed constraint by undergoing a morphological instability, the wavelength of which is dictated by the minimization of the surface and the elastic strain energies of the film.…
Creep is a generic descriptor of slow motions -- in the context of materials, it describes quasi-static deformation of a solid when subjected to stresses below the global yield, at which all rigidity collapses and the material flows. Here,…
Brush-like structures emerge from stretching of long polymer chains, densely grafted on to the surface of an impermeable substrate. They arise due to the competition between conformational entropic elasticity of polymer chains and excluded…
The ubiquitous wall slip behavior of viscoplastic fluids renders the analysis of their steady torsional flow data to determine their yield stress and other parameters of their shear viscosity material function challenging. Roughened…
Motivated by recent experimental studies of rheological hysteresis in soft glassy materials, we study numerically strain rate sweeps in simple yield stress fluids and viscosity bifurcating yield stress fluids. Our simulations of downward…
Simple homogeneous shear flows of frictionless, deformable particles are studied by particle simulations at large shear rates and for differently soft, deformable particles. The particle stiffness sets a time-scale that can be used to scale…
We measure the response of open-cell polyurethane foams filled with a dense suspension of fumed silica particles in polyethylene glycol at compression speeds spanning several orders of magnitude. The gradual compressive stress increase of…
Robotic manipulation of flexible objects is widely required in both industrial and service applications. Among such objects, paper-like materials exhibit distinct mechanical characteristics compared to cloth, being more sensitive to…
When fluid is confined between two molecularly smooth surfaces to a few molecular diameters, it shows a large enhancement of its viscosity. From experiments it seems clear that the fluid is squeezed out layer by layer. A simple solution of…
Although the behavior of entangled polymers in startup shear flows with constant shear rates has been thoroughly investigated, the response under creep has not been frequently considered. In this study, primitive chain network simulations,…
Dispersing small particles in a liquid can produce surprising behaviors when the solids fraction becomes large: rapid shearing drives these systems out of equilibrium and can lead to dramatic increases in viscosity (shear-thickening) or…
We determine the linear viscoelastic response of jammed packings of athermal repulsive viscous spheres, a model for emulsions, wet foams, and soft colloidal suspensions. We numerically measure the complex shear modulus, a fundamental…
Using numerical simulations, we study the dynamical evolution of particles interacting via competing long-range repulsion and short-range attraction in two dimensions. The particles are compressed using a time-dependent quasi-one…
The phenomenon of crumpling is common in our daily life and nature. It exhibits many interesting properties, such as ultra-tough resistance to pressure with less than 30$\%$ of volume density, power-law relation for pressure vs density, and…
We examine the effects of confinement on the dynamics of premelted films driven by thermomolecular pressure gradients. Our approach is to modify a well-studied setting in which the thermomolecular pressure gradient is driven by a…
The micromechanics of a variety of systems experiencing a structural arrest due to their high density could be unified by a thermodynamic framework governing their approach to 'jammed' configurations. The mechanism of supporting an applied…
We investigate the dissipative mechanisms exhibited by creased material sheets when subjected to mechanical loading, which comes in the form of plasticity and relaxation phenomena within the creases. After demonstrating that plasticity…