Related papers: Piercing soft solids: A mechanical theory for need…
Indentation tests are largely exploited in experiments to characterize the mechanical and fracture properties of the materials from the resulting crack patterns. This work proposes an efficient theoretical and computational framework, whose…
Soft elastic composite materials containing particulate rigid inclusions in a soft elastic matrix are candidates for developing soft actuators or tunable damping devices. The possibility to reversibly drive the rigid inclusions within such…
Abstract Background During percutaneous puncture robotic surgical navigation, the needle insertion point is positioned on the patient's chest and abdomen body surface. By locating any point on the soft skin tissue, it is difficult to apply…
Through tridimensonal numerical simulations of crack propagating in material with an elastic moduli heterogeneity it is shown that the presence of a simple inclusion can affect dramatically the propagation of the crack. Both the presence of…
Dicing soft solids with a sharp knife is quicker and smoother if the blade is sliding rapidly parallel to its edge in addition to the normal squeezing motion. We explain this common observation with a consistent theory suited for soft gels…
The interaction between nano- or micro-sized particles and cell membranes is of crucial importance in many biological and biomedical applications such as drug and gene delivery to cells and tissues. During their cellular uptake, the…
Cutting soft materials is a complex process governed by the interplay of bulk large deformation, interfacial soft fracture, and contact forces with the cutting tool. Existing experimental characterizations and numerical models often fail to…
Molecular-dynamics simulations of fracture in metallic glass-like systems are observed to undergo embrittlement due to a small change in interatomic potential. This change in fracture toughness, however, is not accompanied by a…
From bone and wood to concrete and carbon fibre, composites are ubiquitous natural and engineering materials. Eshelby's inclusion theory describes how macroscopic stress fields couple to isolated microscopic inclusions, allowing prediction…
Tearing a thin sheet by forcing a rigid object through it leads to complex crack morphologies; a single oscillatory crack arises when a tool is driven laterally through a brittle sheet, while two diverging cracks and a series of…
Eshelby's theory of inclusions has wide-reaching implications across the mechanics of materials and structures including the theories of composites, fracture, and plasticity. However, it does not include the effects of surface stress, which…
Bistability and snap-through instabilities are central to various mechanisms in nature and engineering, enabling rapid movement and large shape changes with minimal energy input. These phenomena are easily demonstrated by bending a piece of…
Tissue biopsy is the gold standard for diagnosing many diseases, involving the extraction of diseased tissue for histopathology analysis by expert pathologists. However, this procedure has two main limitations: 1) Manual sampling through…
Objective: To present the first real-time a posteriori error-driven adaptive finite element approach for real-time simulation and to demonstrate the method on a needle insertion problem. Methods: We use corotational elasticity and a…
Linear fracture mechanics (or at least the initiation part of that theory) can be framed in a variational context as a minimization problem over a SBD type space. The corresponding functional can in turn be approximated in the sense of…
In this paper, we study the preferential stiffness and the crack-tip fields for an elastic porous solid of which material properties are dependent upon the density. Such a description is necessary to describe the failure that can be caused…
Measuring the mechanical properties of cells and tissues often involves indentation with a sphere, or compression between two plates. Previously, different theoretical approaches have been developed to retrieve material parameters (e.g.…
We report on the onset of fluid entrainment when a contact line is forced to advance over a dry solid of arbitrary wettability. We show that entrainment occurs at a critical advancing speed beyond which the balance between capillary,…
Bistable shells can reversibly change between two stable configurations with very little energetic input. Understanding what governs the shape and snap-through criteria of these structures is crucial for designing devices that utilize…
We propose a general strategy for autonomous guidance and insertion of a needle into a retinal blood vessel. The main challenges underpinning this task are the accurate placement of the needle-tip on the target vein and a careful needle…