Related papers: Mechanics of pressurized cellular sheets
Curved thin sheets are ubiquitously found in nature and manmade structures. Within the framework of classical thin plate theory, the stiffness of thin sheets is independent of its bending state. This assumption, however, goes against…
A thin-walled tube, e.g., a drinking straw, manifests an instability when bent by localizing the curvature change in a small region. This instability has been extensively studied since the seminal work of Brazier nearly a century ago.…
Plant morphology emerges from cellular growth and structure. The turgor-driven diffuse growth of a cell can be highly anisotropic: significant longitudinally and negligible radially. Such anisotropy is ensured by cellulose microfibrils…
We study intact and bulging Escherichia coli cells using atomic force microscopy to separate the contributions of the cell wall and turgor pressure to the overall cell stiffness. We find strong evidence of power-law stress-stiffening in the…
Tuning of active prestress e.g. through activity of molecular motors constitutes a powerful cellular tool to adjust cellular stiffness through nonlinear material properties. Understanding this tool is an important prerequisite for our…
Take a drinking straw and bend it from its ends. After sufficient bending, the tube buckles forming a kink, where the curvature is localized in a very small area. This instability, known generally as the Brazier effect, is inherent to…
Cell mechanical properties are fundamental to the organism but remain poorly understood. We report a comprehensive phenomenological framework for the nonlinear rheology of single fibroblast cells: a superposition of elastic stiffening and…
The wrinkling of thin elastic objects provides a means of generating regular patterning at small scales in applications ranging from photovoltaics to microfluidic devices. Static wrinkle patterns are known to be governed by an energetic…
In our common experience, crumpling a sheet requires external compressive force and leads to a random network of folds. However, thin sheets have been theoretically predicted to spontaneously transition from a flat to a crumpled state…
Cold compaction of ceramic powders is driven by plastic strain, during which the elastic stiffness of the material progressively increases from values typical of granular matter to those representative of a fully dense solid. This increase…
Both animal and plant tissue exhibit a nonlinear rheological phenomenon known as compression stiffening, or an increase in moduli with increasing uniaxial compressive strain. Does such a phenomenon exist in single cells, which are the…
Endocytosis is an essential process by which cells internalize a piece of plasma membrane and material from the outside. In cells with turgor, pressure opposes membrane defor- mations, and increases the amount of force that has to be…
Bacterial cellulose is an important class of biomaterials which can be grown in well-controlled laboratory and industrial conditions. The cellulose structure is affected by several biological, chemical and environmental factors, including…
Soft biological tissues exhibit a remarkable resilience to large mechanical loads, a property which is associated with the strain stiffening capability of the biopolymer networks that structurally support the tissues. Yet, recent studies…
Jammed packings of granular materials display complex mechanical response. For example, the ensemble-averaged shear modulus $\left\langle G \right\rangle$ increases as a power-law in pressure $p$ for static packings of soft spherical…
In a seed plant a pollen tube is a vessel that transports male gamete cells to an ovule to achieve fertilization. It consists of one elongated cell, which exhibits growth oscillations, until it bursts completing its function. Up till now,…
Over the long timescale of many charge/discharge cycles, gas formation can result in large bulging deformations of a Lithium-ion pouch cell, which is a key failure mechanism in batteries. Guided by recent experimental X-ray tomography data…
Two-dimensional crystalline membranes have recently been realized experimentally in such systems as graphene and molybdenum disulfide, sparking a resurgence in interest in their statistical properties. Thermal fluctuations can significantly…
We study the dynamic coarsening of wrinkles in an elastic sheet that is compressed while lying on a thin layer of viscous liquid. When the ends of the sheet are instantaneously brought together by a small distance, viscous resistance…
Cells are modeled with spherical grains connected each other. Each cell can shrink and swell by transporting its fluid content to other connected neighbor while still maintaining its density at constant value. As a spherical part of a cell…