Related papers: Towards active stiffness control in pattern-formin…

Inflated-beam soft robots, such as tip-everting vine robots, can control curvature by contracting one beam side via pneumatic actuation. This work develops a general finite element modeling approach to characterize their bending. The model…

Pattern formation and the mechanics of a mixture of actin filaments and myosin motors that is confined by a rigid membrane is investigated. By using a coarse-grained molecular dynamics model, we demonstrate that the competition between the…

In this paper, lightweight metastructures are designed consisting of prismatic tensegrity building blocks which have excellent strength-to-weight ratio and also enable unique compression-torsion coupling. A theoretical model with coupled…

The present contribution proposes a general constitutive model to simulate the orthotropic stiffness, pre-peak nonlinearity, failure envelopes, and the post-peak softening and fracture of textile composites. Following the microplane model…

Knitted fabrics are metamaterials with remarkable mechanical properties, such as extreme deformability and multiple history-dependent rest shapes. This letter shows that those properties may stem from a continuous set of metastable states…

The purpose of this study is to propose a modified micromorphic continuum model for granular materials based on a micromechanics approach. In this model, Cauchy stress and the couple stress are symmetric conjugated with the symmetric strain…

Granular media near jamming exhibit fascinating properties, which can be harnessed to create jammed-granulate metamaterials: materials whose characteristics arise not only from the shape and material properties of the particles at the…

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,…

When a nematic liquid crystal is confined in a porous medium with strong anchoring conditions, topological defects, called disclinations, are stably formed with numerous possible configurations. Since the energy barriers between them are…

We present a theory for the interaction between active particles and a passive flexible membrane. By explicitly solving for the pressure exerted by the active particles, we show that they reduce the membrane tension and bending modulus and…

A hydrostatically stressed soft elastic film circumvents the imposed constraint by undergoing a morphological instability, the wavelength of which is dictated by the minimization of the surface and the elastic strain energies of the film.…

Macroscopic friction coefficients observed in experiments are the result of various types of complex multiscale interactions between sliding surfaces. Therefore, there are several ways to modify them depending on the physical phenomena…

Starting from a three-dimensional description of an active nematic layer, we employ an asymptotic theory to derive a series of low-dimensional continuum models that capture the coupled dynamics of flat and curved films, including variations…

Nanoporous materials are characterized by their complex porous morphology illustrated by the presence of a solid network and voids. The fraction of these voids is characterized by the porosity of the structure, which influences the bulk…

The study of pattern emergence together with exploration of the exemplar Turing model is enjoying a renaissance both from theoretical and experimental perspective. Here, we implement a stability analysis of spatially dependent reaction…

We consider the shape-topological control of a singularly perturbed variational inequality. The geometry-dependent state problem that we address in this paper concerns a heterogeneous medium with a micro-object (defect) and a macro-object…

While the design of always new metamaterials with exotic static and dynamic properties is attracting deep attention in the last decades, little effort is made to explore their interactions with other materials. This prevents the conception…

Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…

Achieving control and tunability of lyotropic materials has been a long-standing goal of liquid crystal research. Here we show that the elasticity of a liquid crystal system consisting of a dense suspension of semiflexible biopolymers can…

Mechanical metamaterials feature engineered microstructures designed to exhibit exotic, and often counter-intuitive, effective behaviour. Such a behaviour is often achieved through instability-induced transformations of the underlying…