Related papers: Mechanics of pressurized cellular sheets
Eukaryotic cells and intracellular pathogens such as bacteria or viruses utilize the actin polymerization machinery to propel themselves forward. Thereby, the onset of motion and choice of direction may be the result of a spontaneous…
We study the kinematics and dynamics of a highly compliant membrane disk placed head-on in a uniform flow. With increasing flow velocity, the membrane deforms nonlinearly into increasingly parachute-like shapes. These aerodynamically…
In many industrial processes, such as pouring a liquid or coating a rotating cylinder, air bubbles are entrapped inside the liquid. We propose a novel mechanism for this phenomenon, based on the instability of cusp singularities that…
Quantifying the outcomes of cells collisions is a crucial step in building the foundations of a kinetic theory of living matter. Here, we develop a mechanical theory of such collisions by first representing individual cells as extended…
Microrheology, the study of fluids on micron length-scales, promises to reveal insights into cellular biology, including mechanical biomarkers of disease and the interplay between biomechanics and cellular function. Here a…
Biological processes, from morphogenesis to tumor invasion, spontaneously generate shear stresses inside living tissue. The mechanisms that govern the transmission of mechanical forces in epithelia and the collective response of the tissue…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
The shear-induced deformation of a capsule with a stiff nucleus, a model of eukaryotic cells, is studied numerically. The membrane of the cell and of its nucleus are modelled as a thin and impermeable elastic material obeying a Neo-Hookean…
To efficiently simulate very thin, inextensible materials like cloth or paper, it is tempting to replace force-based thin-plate dynamics with hard isometry constraints. Unfortunately, naive formulations of the constraints induce membrane…
Shear thickening, an increase of viscosity with shear rate, is a ubiquitous phenomena in suspended materials that has implications for broad technological applications. Controlling this thickening behavior remains a major challenge and has…
We investigate the properties of membranes under tension by Monte-Carlo simulations of a generic coarse-grained model for lipid bilayers. We give a comprising overview of the behavior of several membrane characteristics, such as the area…
Phase-separated biomolecular condensates with liquid-like properties play a key role in the organization and compartmentalization of the intracellular environment. Condensate-mediated capillary forces acting on membranes drive…
We investigate the mechanical properties of amorphous polymers by means of coarse-grained simulations and nonaffine lattice dynamics theory. A small increase of polymer chain bending stiffness leads first to softening of the material, while…
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…
Connecting cell behavior to tissue shape and mechanics is a key challenge in the physics of morphogenesis. Cytoskeletal turnover precludes a fixed reference state, and tensions are actively generated independently of strain; so conventional…
Roots provide basic functions to plants such as water/nutrient uptake and anchoring in soil. The growth and development of root systems contribute to colonizing the surrounding soil and optimizing the access to resources. It is usually…
Buckling in compression is the archetype of elastic instability: when compressed along its longest dimension, a thin structure such as a playing card will buckle out-of-plane accommodating the imposed compression without a significant…
Cells exhibit qualitatively different behaviors on substrates with different rigidities. The fact that cells are more polarized on the stiffer substrate motivates us to construct a two-dimensional cell with the distribution of focal…
Fluids with internal microstructure like dense suspensions, biological and polymer added fluids, are commonly found in the turbulent regime in many applications. Their flow is extremely difficult to be studied as microstructure complexity…
Control of frictional interactions among liquid-suspended particles has led to tunable, strikingly non-Newtonian rheology via the formation of strong flow constraints as particles come into close proximity under shear. Typically, these…