Related papers: Mechanics of poking a cyst
Guided by recent advances in the understanding of nucleation and propagation of fracture in elastic brittle materials, this paper proposes a suite of three simple experiments that permit the measurement of the three macroscopic material…
Predicting the mechanical response of the soft gel materials under external deformation is of paramount importance in many areas, such as foods, pharmaceuticals, solid-liquid separations, cosmetics, aerogels and drug delivery. Most of the…
During growth, tissue expands and deforms. Given its elastic properties, stresses emerge in an expanding and deforming tissue. Cell rearrangements can dissipate these stresses and numerous experiments confirm the viscoelastic properties of…
Capturing and predicting the effective mechanical properties of highly porous cellular media still represents a significant challenge for the research community, due to their complex structural interdependencies and known size effects.…
Granular chain packings exhibit a striking emergent strain-stiffening behavior despite the individual looseness of the constitutive chains. Using indentation experiments on such assemblies, we measure an exponential increase in the…
We study the depinning transitions of elastic strings in disordered media in two different cases. We consider the elastic forces to be of infinite range in one case, where the magnitude is proportional to the extension of the string. The…
Elucidating the interplay of stress and geometry is a fundamental scientific question arising in multiple fields. In this work, we investigate the geometric frustration of crystalline caps confined on the sphere in both elastic and plastic…
We continue the development of a method to accurately and efficiently identify the constitutive behavior of complex materials through full-field observations that we started in Akerson, Rajan and Bhattacharya (2024). We formulate the…
To mimic the mechanical response of passive biological cilia in complex fluids, we study the bending dynamics of an anchored elastic fiber submitted to a dilute granular suspension under shear. We show that the bending fluctuations of the…
We give a bird's-eye view of the plastic deformation of crystals aimed at the statistical physics community, and a broad introduction into the statistical theories of forced rigid systems aimed at the plasticity community. Memory effects in…
Entangled matter displays unusual and attractive properties and mechanisms: tensile strength, capabilities for assembly and disassembly, damage tolerance. While some of the attributes and mechanisms share some traits with traditional…
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…
If you walk on sand, it supports your weight. How do the disordered forces between particles in sand organize, to keep you from sinking? This simple question is surprisingly difficult to answer experimentally: measuring forces in three…
We study the effects realistic fracture criteria have on crack morphology obtained in numerical simulations with a stochastic discrete element method. Results are obtained with two criteria which are consistent with the theory of elasticity…
The mechanical behavior of antigorite strongly influences the strength and deformation of the subduction interface. Although there is microstructural evidence elucidating the nature of brittle deformation at low pressures, there is often…
The low elastic modulus of soft materials, combined with geometric nonlinearity and rate dependence, presents significant challenges in the characterization of their mechanical response. We introduce a novel method for measuring the…
We show how strain stiffening affects the elastic response to internal forces, caused either by material defects and inhomogeneities or by active forces that molecular motors generate in living cells. For a spherical force dipole in a…
In quasi-two-dimensional experiments with photoelastic particles confined to an annular region, an intruder constrained to move in a circular path halfway between the annular walls experiences stick-slip dynamics. We discuss the response of…
Since the seminal work by Nagel and Weiss, the iteration stable (STIT) tessellations have attracted considerable interest in stochastic geometry as a natural and flexible, yet analytically tractable model for hierarchical spatial…
The deformations of flagella are important in the motility of single- and multi-flagellated bacteria. Existing numerical methods have treated flagella as extensible filaments with a large extensional modulus, resulting in a stiff numerical…