Related papers: Mechanics of pressurized cellular sheets
We study numerically how multiple deformable capsules squeeze into a constriction. This situation is largely encountered in microfluidic chips designed to manipulate living cells, which are soft entities. We use fully three-dimensional…
A growing or compressed thin elastic sheet adhered to a rigid substrate can exhibit a buckling instability, forming an inward hump. Our study shows that the strip morphology depends on the delicate balance between the compression energy and…
Living cells are characterized by the micrometric confinement of various macromolecules at high concentrations. Using droplets containing binary polymer blends as artificial cells, we previously showed that cell-sized confinement causes…
Small flexible fibers in a turbulent flow are found to be most of the time as straight as stiff rods. This is due to the cooperative action of flexural rigidity and fluid stretching. However, fibers might bend and buckle when they tumble…
Crumpling of a thin film leads to a unique stiff yet lightweight structure. The stiffness has been attributed to a complex interplay between four basic elements - smooth bends, sharp folds, localized points (developable cones), and…
The buckling of thin elastic sheets is a classic mechanical instability that occurs over a wide range of scales. In the extreme limit of atomically thin membranes like graphene, thermal fluctuations can dramatically modify such mechanical…
Living cells respond to mechanical changes in the matrix surrounding them by applying contractile forces that are in turn transmitted to distant cells. We calculate the mechanical work that each cell performs in order to deform the matrix,…
Thin elastic solids are easily deformed into a myriad of three-dimensional shapes, which may contain sharp localized structures as in a crumpled candy wrapper, or have smooth and diffuse features like the undulating edge of a flower.…
Deformations of cell sheets during morphogenesis are driven by developmental processes such as cell division and cell shape changes. In morphoelastic shell theories of development, these processes appear as variations of the intrinsic…
This work is devoted to analyze the relation between the thermodynamic properties of a confined fluid and the shape of its confining vessel. Recently, new insights in this topic were found through the study of cluster integrals for…
Matrix stiffness expressions are derived for the particle movements in an assembly of rigid granules having compliant contacts. The derivations include stiffness terms that arise from the particle shapes at their contacts. These geometric…
Many bacterial species are helical in form, including the widespread pathogen H. pylori. Motivated by recent experiments on H. pylori showing that cell wall synthesis is not uniform, we investigate the possible formation of helical cell…
Magnetic flux tubes in the solar wind can be twisted as they are transported from the solar surface, where the tubes are twisted owing to photospheric motions. It is suggested that the twisted magnetic tubes can be detected as the variation…
Gels are used to design bilayered structures with high residual stresses. The swelling of a thin layer on a compliant substrate leads to compressive stresses. The post-buckling of this layer is investigated experimentally; the wavelengths…
We have studied experimentally and theoretically the response of randomly folded hyperelastic and elastoplastic sheets on the uniaxial compression loading and the statistical properties of crumpling networks. The results of these studies…
Thermalized elastic membranes without distant self-avoidance are believed to undergo a crumpling transition when the microscopic bending stiffness is comparable to $kT$, the scale of thermal fluctuations. Most potential physical…
A 3D unit cell model containing eight different spherical particles embedded in a homogeneous strain gradient plasticity (SGP) matrix material is presented. The interaction between particles and matrix is controlled by an interface model…
Thin elastic sheets bend easily, leading to mechanical instabilities such as wrinkling. Here, we investigate wrinkles at edges of bi-strips, which consist of two thin sheets, one that swells and one that does not, joined side-by-side. It is…
The processing of thin-structured materials in a fluidic environment, from nearly inextensible but flexible graphene sheets to highly extensible polymer films, arises in many applications. So far, little is known about the dynamics of such…
We investigate the mechanical behavior of a confined granular packing of irregular polyhedral particles under repeated heating and cooling cycles by means of numerical simulations with the Non-Smooth Contact Dynamics method. Assuming a…