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The actin cytoskeleton is remarkably adaptable and multifunctional. It often organizes into nematic bundles such as contractile rings or stress fibers. However, how a uniform and isotropic actin gel self-organizes into dense nematic bundles…
Future active metamaterials for reconfigurable structural applications require fast, untethered, reversible, and reprogrammable (multimodal) transformability with shape locking. Herein, we aim to construct and demonstrate a…
One of the most interesting phenomena in the soft-matter realm consists in the spontaneous formation of super-molecular structures (microphases) in condition of thermodynamic equilibrium. A simple mechanism responsible for this…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials are compliant structures engineered to achieve unique properties via the large deformation of their components. While their static character has been studied extensively, the study of their dynamic…
Active gels are a class of biologically-relevant material containing embedded agents that spontaneously generate forces acting on a sparse filament network. In vitro experiments of protein filaments and molecular motors have revealed a…
Adaptive structures are of interest for their ability to dynamically modify mechanical properties post fabrication, enabling structural performance that is responsive to environmental uncertainty and changing loading conditions. Dynamic…
Active networks made of biopolymers and motor proteins are valuable bioinspired systems that have been used in the last decades to study the cytoskeleton and its self-organization under mechanical stimulation. Different techniques are…
Amongst the various fascinating types of material behavior featured by magnetic gels and elastomers are magnetostrictive effects. That is, deformations in shape or changes in volume are induced from outside by external magnetic fields.…
Topological defects play a central role in the physics of many materials, including magnets, superconductors and liquid crystals. In active fluids, defects become autonomous particles that spontaneously propel from internal active stresses…
Composites with high strength and high fracture resistance are desirable for structural and protective applications. Most composites, however, suffer from poor damage tolerance and are prone to unpredictable fractures. Understanding the…
Mechanical metamaterials are artificial composites with tunable advanced mechanical properties. Particularly interesting types of mechanical metamaterials are flexible metamaterials, which harness internal rotations and instabilities to…
Two classes of non-linear elastic materials are derived via two-dimensional homogenization. These materials are equivalent to a periodic grid of axially-deformable and axially-preloaded structural elements, subject to incremental…
The failure of mechanical metamaterials is a function of the interplay between the properties of the base material and the microstructural geometry. Stochastic failure properties of the base material and disordered microstructural…
Filamentous bio-materials such as fibrin or collagen networks exhibit an enormous stiffening of their elastic moduli upon large deformations. This pronounced nonlinear behavior stems from a significant separation between the stiffnesses…
This paper addresses formation control of reduced attitudes in which a continuous control protocol is proposed for achieving and stabilizing all regular polyhedra (also known as Platonic solids) under a unified framework. The protocol…
In the present work, two machine learning based constitutive models for finite deformations are proposed. Using input convex neural networks, the models are hyperelastic, anisotropic and fulfill the polyconvexity condition, which implies…
The design of adaptive structures is one method to improve sustainability of buildings. Adaptive structures are able to adapt to different loading and environmental conditions or to changing requirements by either small or large shape…
We investigate pattern transformations of periodic hydrogel systems that are triggered by swelling-induced structural instabilities. The types of microstructures considered in the present work include single-phase and two-phase voided…
Geometric frustration offers a pathway to soft matter self-assembly with controllable finite sizes. While the understanding of frustration in soft matter assembly derives almost exclusively from continuum elastic descriptions, a current…
Thermoplastic polyurethanes (TPU) are block copolymeric materials composed of plastomeric "hard" and elastomeric "soft" domains, by which they exhibit highly resilient yet dissipative large deformation features depending on volume fractions…