Related papers: Tensegrity-Inspired Polymer Films: Progressive Ben…
The present paper is concerned with the formulation of new assembly methods of bi-material tensegrity prisms, and the experimental characterization of the compressive response of such structures. The presented assembly techniques are easy…
Confined geometries offer useful and experimentally amenable mechanical testing arrangements in which to study the molecular and micro-structural processes which govern plastic yield in stress environments dominated by hydrostatic pressure…
Crumpling of a thin film leads to a unique stiff yet lightweight structure. The stiffness has been attributed to a complex interplay between four basic elements - smooth bends, sharp folds, localized points (developable cones), and…
Polymer glasses have numerous advantageous mechanical properties in comparison to other materials. One of the most useful is the high degree of toughness that can be achieved due to significant yield occurring in the material. Remarkably,…
Nanoscale polymeric thin films are widely used in diverse applications such as energy devices, flexible electronics and biosensors, where a satisfactory mechanical performance is of vital importance to realize their full functionality. It…
Glassy polymers show strain hardening: at constant extensional load, their flow first accelerates, then arrests. Recent experiments under such loading have found this to be accompanied by a striking dip in the segmental relaxation time.…
We investigate the mechanical properties of amorphous polymers by means of coarse-grained simulations and nonaffine lattice dynamics theory. A small increase of polymer chain bending stiffness leads first to softening of the material, while…
This work focuses on planar growth-induced instabilities in three-dimensional bilayer structures, i.e., thick stiff film on a compliant substrate. Growth-induced instabilities are examined for a different range of fiber stiffness with a…
When a flexible plate is peeled off a thin and soft elastic film bonded to a rigid support, uniformly spaced fingering patterns develop along their line of contact. While, the wavelength of these patterns depends only on the thickness of…
Thin elastic sheets and membranes are known to wrinkle when they are stretched -- the associated physics is highly non-linear. The mechanics of thin films that exhibit unusual behavior upon stretching, when they possess auxetic structure,…
Changes in the dynamics of supported polymer films in comparison to bulk materials involve a complex convolution of effects, such as substrate interactions, roughness and compliance, in addition to film thickness. We consider molecular…
Simulations are used to examine the microscopic origins of strain hardening in polymer glasses. While traditional entropic network models can be fit to the total stress, their underlying assumptions are inconsistent with simulation results.…
We study the geometrically nonlinear behavior of uniformly compressed tensegrity prisms, through fully elastic and rigid--elastic models. The presented models predict a variety of mechanical behaviors in the regime of large displacements,…
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…
Glassy polymers show strain hardening: at constant extensional load, their flow first accelerates, then arrests. Recent experiments have found this to be accompanied by a striking and unexplained dip in the segmental relaxation time. Here…
A collection of thin structures buckle, bend, and bump into each-other when confined. This contact can lead to the formation of patterns: hair will self-organize in curls; DNA strands will layer into cell nuclei; paper, when crumpled, will…
Many objects in nature and industry are wrapped in a thin sheet to enhance their chemical, mechanical, or optical properties. There are similarly a variety of methods for wrapping, from pressing a film onto a hard substrate, to using…
Ultrathin polymer films that are produced e.g. by spin-coating are believed to be stressed since polymers are 'frozen in' into out-of-equilibrium configurations during this process. In the framework of a viscoelastic thin film model, we…
Solutions of semiflexible polymers confined by repulsive planar walls are studied by density functional theory and Molecular Dynamics simulations, to clarify the competition between the chain alignment favored by the wall and the depletion…
When tensioned, ordinary materials expand along the direction of the applied force. Here, we explore network concepts to design metamaterials exhibiting negative compressibility transitions, during which a material undergoes contraction…