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Cellulose is one of the most versatile substances in the world. Its immense variety of applications was in recent years complemented by interesting nanotechnological applications. The fabrication of complex cellulose-based materials asks…
Electrogenerated gas nanobubbles strongly influence the performance of electrochemical energy-conversion systems, yet their nucleation and early evolution remain poorly understood due to limitations of existing experimental and…
The electrohydrodynamics of vesicle suspensions is characterized by studying their pairwise interactions in applied DC electric fields in two dimensions. In the dilute limit, the rheology of the suspension is shown to vary nonlinearly with…
Compressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence is ubiquitous in astrophysical phenomena ranging from the intergalactic to the stellar scales. In studying them, numerical simulations are nearly inescapable, due to the large degree of…
Electromagnetic fields with complex spatial variation routinely arise in Nature. We study the response of a small molecule to monochromatic fields of arbitrary three-dimensional geometry. First, we consider the allowed configurations of the…
The electrophoretic behaviour of flexible polyelectrolyte chains ranging from single monomers up to long fragments of hundred repeat units is studied by a mesoscopic simulation approach. Abstracting from the atomistic details of the…
The elastic properties of granular hydrogels are commonly characterised under wet conditions, yet the influence of capillary interactions remains unclear. In practical applications, hydrogels operate in aqueous environments containing…
The elastohydrodynamics of slender bodies in a viscous fluid have long been the source of theoretical investigation, being pertinent to the microscale world of ciliates and flagellates as well as to biological and engineered active matter…
Cells and other soft particles are often forced to flow in confined geometries in both laboratory and natural environments, where the elastic deformation induces an additional drag and pressure drop across the particle. In contrast with…
Within the cell, biopolymers are often situated in constrained, fluid environments, e.g., cytoskeletal networks, stretched DNAs in chromatin. It is of paramount importance to understand quantitatively how they, utilizing their flexibility,…
We introduce a compact yet highly expressive design space for shellular metamaterials. By employing only a few dozen degrees of freedom, this design space represents geometries ranging from simple planar configurations to complex triply…
Ferrogels, i.e. swollen polymer networks into which magnetic particles are immersed, can be considered as "smart materials" since their shape and elasticity can be controlled by an external magnetic field. Using molecular dynamics…
Generation of mechanical force regulated by external electric field is studied both theoretically and by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The force arises in deformable bodies linked to the free end of a grafted polyelectrolyte chain…
Similarly-charged polyelectrolytes are known to attract each other and aggregate into bundles when the charge density of the polymers exceeds a critical value that depends on the valency of the counterions. The dynamics of aggregation of…
It is established that the mechanical properties of hydrogels control the fate of (stem) cells. However, despite its importance, a one-to-one correspondence between gels' stiffness and cell behaviour is still missing from literature. In…
In this paper we study the electrostatic interaction of a heterogeneously charged wall with a neutral semipermeable membrane. The wall consists of periodic stripes, where the charge density varies in one direction. The membrane is in a…
We study the electro-hydrodynamics of the Debye screening layer that arises in an aqueous binary solution near a planar insulating wall when applying a spatially modulated AC-voltage. Combining this with first order perturbation theory we…
Magneto-active elastomers exhibit large, nonlinear deformations under combined mechanical loading and magnetic fields, and their effective behavior is strongly governed by microstructural heterogeneity. Predictive modeling of these…
In this paper, we develop a general mathematical framework for the electro-osmosis problem to design simultaneous microscale electric and hydrodynamic cloaking in a Hele-Shaw configuration. A novel approach to achieving simultaneously…
The folding transition of biopolymers from the coil to compact structures has attracted wide research interest in the past and is well studied in polymer physics. Recent seminal works on DNA in confined devices have shown that these long…