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Physically assembled gels have promising applications in many fields because of their tunable mechanical properties. Here, we report the mechanical properties as a function of polymer volume fraction ($\phi$) for a physical gel system…
Surface stress and surface energy are two fundamental parameters that determine the surface properties of any materials. While it is commonly believed that the surface stress and surface energy of liquids are identical, the relationship…
Dynamical heterogeneity is a signature phenomenon of deeply supercooled liquids and glasses. Here, we demonstrate that the spatiotemporal correlations between local relaxation events that underpin it are the result of local relaxation…
Entanglement of polymer chains is ubiquitous in elastomers, gels, and biological tissues. While the effects of chain entanglement on elasticity and viscoelasticity of polymer networks have been intensively studied, it remains elusive how…
The mechanical properties of cells are dominated by the cytoskeleton, an interconnected network of long elastic filaments. The connections between the filaments are provided by crosslinking proteins, which constitute, next to the filaments,…
We study swelling and structural properties of ionic microgel suspensions within a comprehensive coarse-grained model that combines the polymeric and colloidal natures of microgels as permeable, compressible, charged spheres governed by…
Using Brownian dynamics simulations we study gel-forming colloid-polymer mixtures. The focus of this article lies on the differences of dense and dilute gel networks in terms of structure formation both on a local and a global level. We…
Cytoskeletal gels are prototyped to reproduce the mechanical contraction of the cytoskeleton in-vitro. They are composed of a polymer network (backbone), swollen by the presence of a liquid solvent, and active molecules (molecular motors,…
We investigate the cyclic mechanical behavior in uniaxial tension of three different commercial thermoplastic polyurethane elastomers (TPU) often considered as a sustainable replacement for common filled elastomers. All TPU have similar…
Polymers near the glass transition temperature Tg often exhibit a breakdown of time-temperature-superposition (TTS), with chain relaxation times and viscosity exhibiting a weaker temperature dependence than segmental relaxation times. The…
From microactuators to biological tissues, non-porous materials with the ability to strongly expand when in contact with a solvent are ubiquitous. Consequently, the swelling of polymer systems such as hydrogel has received recently much…
The swelling dynamics of polymer gels are characterized by the (collective) diffusion coefficient $D$ of the polymer network. Here, we measure the temperature dependence of $D$ of polymer gels with controlled homogeneous network structures…
Filamentous bio-materials such as fibrin or collagen networks exhibit an enormous stiffening of their elastic moduli upon large deformations. This pronounced nonlinear behavior stems from a significant separation between the stiffnesses…
We recast the problem of hydrogel swelling under physical constraints as an energy optimization problem. We apply this approach to compute equilibrium shapes of hydrogel spheres confined within a jammed matrix of rigid beads, and interpret…
We report on the direct measurement of the correlation times of the protein backbone carbons and proximal waters of hydration in mechanically strained elastin by nuclear magnetic resonance methods. The experimental data indicate a decrease…
By combining continuum elasticity theory and tight-binding atomistic simulations, we work out the constitutive nonlinear stress-strain relation for graphene stretching elasticity and we calculate all the corresponding nonlinear elastic…
We investigate the linear viscoelasticity of polymer gels produced by the dispersion of gluten proteins in water:ethanol binary mixtures with various ethanol contents, from pure water to 60% v/v ethanol. We show that the complex…
In polymers melts and supercooled liquids, the glassy dynamics is characterized by the rattling of monomers or particles in the cage formed by their neighbors. Recently, a direct correlation in such systems, described by a universal scaling…
Understanding how topological constraints affect the dynamics of polymers in solution is at the basis of any polymer theory and it is particularly needed for melts of rings. These polymers fold as crumpled and space-filling objects and,…
We investigate the shear elastic modulus of soft polymer foams loaded with hard spherical particles and we show that, for constant bubble size and gas volume fraction, strengthening is strongly dependent on the size of those inclusions.…