Related papers: Knitting Multistability
Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
As 2D materials such as graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, and 2D polymers become more prevalent, solution processing and colloidal-state properties are being exploited to create advanced and functional materials. However, our…
Knitting interloops one-dimensional yarns into three-dimensional fabrics that exhibit behaviours beyond their constitutive materials. How extensibility and anisotropy emerge from the hierarchical organisation of yarns into knitted fabrics…
We investigate the mechanical behavior of jammed knitted fabrics, where geometric confinement leads to an initially stiff mechanical response that softens into low stiffness behavior with additional applied stress. We show that the jammed…
We investigate the sliding strength of thin filaments in frictional contact with a translating cylinder, perpendicular to the filaments' axes, in knotted (clove hitch) and unknotted (capstan) configurations. Recent work reported superlinear…
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,…
4D printing empowers 3D printed structures made of hydrogels, liquid crystals or shape memory polymers, with reversible morphing capabilities in response to an external stimulus. To apply reversible shape-change to stiff lightweight…
Snapping of a slender structure is utilized in a wide range of natural and man-made systems, mostly to achieve rapid movement without relying on muscle-like elements. Although several mechanisms for elastic energy storage and rapid release…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
It is shown that a compound elastic structure, which displays a dynamic instability, may be designed as the union (or 'fusion') of two structures which are stable when separately analyzed. The compound elastic structure has two degrees of…
Spontaneous material shape changes, such as swelling, growth or thermal expansion, can be used to trigger dramatic elastic instabilities in thin shells. These instabilities originate in geometric incompatibility between the preferred…
Twisting sheets as a strategy to form functional yarns relies on millennia of human practice in making catguts and fabric wearables, but still lacks overarching principles to guide their intricate architectures. We show that twisted…
A complete approach for the determination of the complex constitutive behaviour of textile composites through finite element simulation is presented in this paper. In this work, simulations of different loading cases are carried out on…
Induced by proteins within the cell membrane or by differential growth, heating, or swelling, spontaneous curvatures can drastically affect the morphology of thin bodies and induce mechanical instabilities. Yet, the interaction of…
Three general modes are distinguished in the deformation of a thin shell; these are stretching, drilling, and bending. Of these, the drilling mode is the one more likely to emerge in a soft matter shell (as compared to a hard, structural…
Macromolecules can gain special properties by adopting knotted conformations, but engineering knotted macromolecules is a challenging task. Here we surprisingly observed that knotting can be very effectively produced in active polymers.…
We present a monolithic mechanical metamaterial comprising a periodic arrangement of snapping units with tunable tensile behavior. Under tension, the metamaterial undergoes a large extension caused by sequential snap-through instabilities,…
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…
We use numerical simulations to show how noninteracting hard particles binding to a deformable elastic shell may self-assemble into a variety of linear patterns. This is a result of the nontrivial elastic response to deformations of shells.…
Living organisms have mastered the dynamic control of internal stresses to perform an array of functions, such as change shape and locomote. State-of-the-art attempts to replicate this ability in synthetic materials are rudimentary in…