Related papers: Stress Isotropization in Weakly Jammed Granular Pa…
Athermal packings of soft repulsive spheres exhibit a sharp jamming transition in the thermodynamic limit. Upon further compression, various structural and mechanical properties display clean power-law behavior over many decades in…
We probe the onset and effect of contact changes in soft harmonic particle packings which are sheared quasistatically. We find that the first contact changes are the creation or breaking of contacts on a single particle. We characterize the…
The ubiquitous appearance of regions of localized deformation (shear bands) in different kinds of disordered materials under shear is studied in the context of a mesoscopic model of plasticity. The model may or may not include relaxational…
The effect of a local shear transformation on plastic deformation of a three-dimensional amorphous solid is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider a spherical inclusion, which is gradually transformed into an ellipsoid of…
The dynamical mechanism at the origin of the non-local rheology of dense granular flows is investigated trough discrete element simulations. We show that the influence of a shear band on the mechanical behavior of a distant zone is…
Packings of macroscopic granular chains capture some of the essential aspects of molecular polymer systems and have been suggested as a paradigm to understand the physics on a molecular scale. However, here we demonstrate that the…
The influence of variable-amplitude loading on the potential energy and mechanical properties of amorphous materials is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We study a binary mixture that is either rapidly or slowly cooled…
A two dimensional amorphous material is modeled as an assembly of mesoscopic elemental pieces coupled together to form an elastically coherent structure. Plasticity is introduced as the existence of different minima in the energy landscape…
We study theoretically the dynamics of soft glassy materials during the process of stress relaxation following the rapid imposition of a shear strain. By detailed numerical simulations of a mesoscopic soft glassy rheology model and three…
The shear rheology of dense colloidal and granular suspensions is strongly nonlinear, as these materials exhibit shear-thinning and shear-thickening, depending on multiple physical parameters. We numerically study the rheology of a simple…
Soft glassy materials such as mayonnaise, wet clays, or dense microgels display under external shear a solid-to-liquid transition. Such a shear-induced transition is often associated with a non-monotonic stress response, in the form of a…
Shear transformations (i.e., localised rearrangements of particles resulting in the shear deformation of a small region of the sample) are the building blocks of mesoscale models for the flow of disordered solids. In order to compute the…
When an amorphous material is strained beyond the point of yielding it enters a state of continual reconfiguration via dissipative, avalanche-like slip events that relieve built-up local stress. However, how the statistics of such events…
Widespread processes in nature and technology are governed by the dynamical transition whereby a material in an initially solid-like state then yields plastically. Major unresolved questions concern whether any material will yield smoothly…
We study by means of molecular dynamics simulations of periodic shear cells, the influence of particle shape on the global mechanical behavior of dense granular media. Results at macro-mechanical level show that for large shear deformation…
Local rearrangements are the elements of plastic deformation in an amorphous solid. In oscillatory shear, they can switch reversibly between two distinct configurations. While these repeating relaxations are typically considered in the…
We compare the structural and mechanical properties of mechanically stable (MS) packings of frictional disks in two spatial dimensions (2D) generated with isotropic compression and simple shear protocols from discrete element modeling (DEM)…
Athermal systems across a large range of length scales, ranging from foams and granular bead packings to crumpled metallic sheets, exhibit slow stress relaxation when compressed. Experimentally they show a non-monotonic stress response when…
We report on experiments to measure the temporal and spatial evolution of packing arrangements of anisotropic and weakly confined granular material, using high-resolution $\gamma$-ray adsorption. In these experiments, the particle…
The shear-modulus and yield-stress of amorphous solids are important material parameters, with the former determining the rate of increase of stress under external strain and the latter being the stress value at which the material flows in…