Related papers: Piercing soft solids: A mechanical theory for need…
Precise needle alignment is essential for percutaneous needle insertion in robotic ultrasound-guided procedures. However, inherent challenges such as speckle noise, needle-like artifacts, and low image resolution make robust needle…
Soft adhesive contacts are ubiquitous in nature and are increasingly used in synthetic systems, such as flexible electronics and soft robots, due to their advantages over traditional joining techniques. While methods to study the failure of…
Experimentally measuring the elastic properties of thin biological surfaces is non-trivial, particularly when they are curved. One technique that may be used is the indentation of a thin sheet of material by a rigid indenter, whilst…
This review provides an introduction to the essential physics of soft adhesion, including the thermodynamics of adhesion and wetting, the mechanics of contact with deformable materials, and the material properties that most affect…
Medical cyber-physical systems are safety-critical, and as such, require ongoing verification of their correct behavior, as system failure during run time may cause severe (or even fatal) personal damage. However, creating a verifiable…
The mechanical yielding of amorphous solids under external loading can be broadly classified into ductile and brittle types, depending on whether their macroscopic stress response is smooth or abrupt, respectively. Recently, it has been…
This study introduces a physics-based machine learning framework for modeling both brittle and ductile fractures. Unlike physics-informed neural networks, which solve partial differential equations by embedding physical laws as soft…
The localized loading of an elastic sheet floating on a liquid bath occurs at scales from a frog sitting on a lily pad to a volcano supported by the Earth's tectonic plates. The load is supported by a combination of the stresses within the…
In this paper we describe a new robotic brachytherapy needle-insertion system that is designed to replace the template used in the manual technique. After a brief review of existing robotic systems, we describe the requirements that we…
The development of needle-free drug injection systems is of great importance to global healthcare. However, in spite of its great potential and research history over many decades, these systems are not commonly used. One of the main…
Compressing a porous, fluid-filled material will drive the interstitial fluid out of the pore space, as when squeezing water out of a kitchen sponge. Inversely, injecting fluid into a porous material can deform the solid structure, as when…
We study the critical behavior of low-frequency vibrations of packings with pinned particles near the jamming point. Soft modes form a plateau in the density of states and its frequency is controlled by the contact number as the ordinary…
Despite recent progress in our understanding of complex dynamic networks, it remains challenging to devisesufficiently accurate models to observe, control or predict the state of real systems in biology, economics or other fields. A largely…
The magnitude of force used in a stabbing incident can be difficult to quantify, although the estimate given by forensic pathologists is often seen as `critical' evidence in medico-legal situations. The main objective of this study is to…
Curvature and mechanics are intimately connected for thin materials, and this coupling between geometry and physical properties is readily seen in folded structures from intestinal villi and pollen grains, to wrinkled membranes and…
We present an error-controlled mesh refinement procedure for needle insertion simulation and apply it to the simulation of electrode implantation for deep brain stimulation, including brain shift. Our approach enables to control the error…
Soft composite solids are made of inclusions dispersed within soft matrices. They are ubiquitous in nature and form the basis of many biological tissues. In the field of materials science, synthetic soft composites are promising candidates…
Fitting two different materials is a versatile methodology in manufacturing complex structures. One of the canonical models for fitting is the snap-fit model, in which flexible materials and rigid structures are assembled by pushing their…
The material characterization of ultra-thin solid sheets, including two-dimensional materials like graphene, is often performed through indentation tests on a flake suspended over a hole in a substrate. While this `suspended indentation' is…
When a hole is introduced into an elastic material, it will usually act to reduce the overall mechanical stiffness. A general ambition is to investigate whether a stiff shell around the hole can act to maintain the overall mechanical…