Related papers: Towards active stiffness control in pattern-formin…
Recent experiments have exploited elastic instabilities in membranes to create complex patterns. However, the rational design of such structures poses many challenges, as they are products of nonlinear elastic behavior. We pose a simple…
A thin flat rectangular plate supported on its edges and subjected to in-plane loading exhibits stable post-buckling behaviour. However, the introduction of a nonlinear (softening) elastic foundation may cause the response to become…
Multi-step pathways, constituted of a sequence of reconfigurations, are central to a wide variety of natural and man-made systems. Such pathways autonomously execute in self-guided processes such as protein folding and self-assembly, but…
Metamaterials with floppy modes called mechanisms are a burgeoning template for shape-morphing systems and structures across scales. Here, we present a design recipe that transforms an arbitrary plane tiling into a 2D kirigami pattern with…
Cellular solids and micro-lattices are a class of lightweight architected materials that have been established for their unique mechanical, thermal, and acoustic properties. It has been shown that by tuning material architecture, a…
Natural materials often feature a combination of soft and stiff phases, arranged to achieve excellent mechanical properties, such as high strength and toughness. Many natural materials have even independently evolved to have similar…
Flow instabilities within a fluid flow can cause laminar-to-turbulent transition over surfaces. These instabilities can result from upstream, wake-generating disturbances, leading to increased drag and turbulence-induced energy losses. Flow…
We introduce a model of fracture which includes the out-of-plane degrees of freedom necessary to describe buckling in a thin-sheet material. The model is a regular square lattice of elastic beams, rigidly connected at the nodes so as to…
Topological mechanical metamaterials have enabled new ways to control stress and deformation propagation. Exemplified by Maxwell lattices, they have been studied extensively using a linearized formalism. Herein, we study a two-dimensional…
Recent experiments on active materials, such as dense bacterial suspensions and microtubule-kinesin motor mixtures, show a promising potential for achieving self-sustained flows. However, to develop active microfluidics it is necessary to…
Architected metamaterials such as foams and lattices exhibit a wide range of properties governed by microstructural instabilities and emerging phase transformations. Their macroscopic response--including energy dissipation during impact,…
We numerically study two-dimensional active nematics with periodic activity patterning. For stripes of activity, we observe a transition from two-dimensional to one-dimensional active turbulence as the maximum active force and distance…
A numerical study on the elastic response of single- and multi-layer systems formed by alternating pentamode lattices and stiffening plates is presented. Finite element simulations are conducted to analyze the dependence of the effective…
Active fluids, such as suspensions of microswimmers, are known to self-organize into complex spatio-temporal flow patterns. An intriguing example is mesoscale turbulence, a state of dynamic vortex structures exhibiting a characteristic…
Understanding the mechanical instabilities of two-dimensional membranes has strong connection to the subjects of structure instabilities, morphology control and materials failures. In this work, we investigate the plastic mechanism…
Recent advances in additive manufacturing methods make it possible, for the first time, to manufacture complex micro-architectured solids that achieve desired stress versus strain responses. Here, we report experimental measurements and…
Materials with J-shaped stress-strain behavior under uniaxial stretching, where strength increases as deformation progresses, have been developed through various materials designs. On the other hand, polymer materials that progressively…
For thin networked materials, which are spatial discrete structures constructed by continuum components, a paradox on the effective thickness defined by the in-plane and out-of-plane stiffnesses is found, i.e. the effective thickness is not…
Many structural properties of conventional passive materials are known to arise from the symmetries of their microscopic constituents. By contrast, it is largely unclear how the interplay between cell shape and self-propulsion controls the…
We investigate how material rigidity acts as a key control parameter for the failure of solids under stress. In both experiments and simulations, we demonstrate that material failure can be continuously tuned by varying the underlying…