Related papers: The Soft-Membrane Surface Forces Apparatus
The equilibrium and fluctuation methods for determining the surface tension, $\sigma$, and bending modulus, $\kappa$, of a bilayer membrane with a fixed projected area are discussed. In the fluctuation method the elastic coefficients…
This study proposes a family of novel mechanically-soft and magnetically-hard magnetorheological foams that, upon deformation, lead to robust and measurable magnetic flux changes in their surroundings. This allows to infer qualitatively and…
We compare the results of capacitance measurements in the lens-plane and sphere-plane configurations with theoretical predictions from various models of a spherical surface. It is shown that capacitance measurements are incapable of…
Microorganisms are rarely found in Nature swimming freely in an unbounded fluid. Instead, they typically encounter other organisms, hard walls, or deformable boundaries such as free interfaces or membranes. Hydrodynamic interactions between…
An experimental protocol is developed to directly measure the new material functions revealed by medium amplitude parallel superposition (MAPS) rheology. This experimental protocol measures the medium amplitude response of a material to a…
Flexible robots have advantages over rigid robots in their ability to conform physically to their environment and to form a wide variety of shapes. Sensing the force applied by or to flexible robots is useful for both navigation and…
We study the effective forces acting between colloidal particles trapped at a fluid interface which itself is exposed to a pressure field. To this end we apply what we call the ``force approach'', which relies solely on the condition of…
The dynamic properties of membranes have been object of many researches since they can be used as sensor heads in different devices. Some methods have been proposed to solve the problem of determining the resonance frequencies and their…
Soft robots have become increasingly popular for complex manipulation tasks requiring gentle and safe contact. However, their softness makes accurate control challenging, and high-fidelity sensing is a prerequisite to adequate control…
We investigate the systematic design of compliant morphing structures composed of materials reacting to an external stimulus. We add a perimeter penalty term to ensure existence of solutions. We propose a phase-field approximation of this…
We have realized a suspended, high-reflectivity focusing metamirror ($f\approx 10$ cm, $\mathcal{R} \approx 99\%$) by non-periodic photonic crystal patterning of a Si$_3$N$_4$ membrane. The design enables construction of a stable, short…
This paper presents the design, characterization and validation of a wearable haptic device able to convey skin stretch, force feedback, and a combination of both, to the user's arm. In this work, we carried out physical and perceptual…
Wearable devices are becoming increasingly important, addressing needs in both the fitness and the medical markets. In this paper, we describe a novel sensing platform based on a hollow-core polyurethane optical fiber, operating through…
Mechanical metamaterials are usually designed to show desired responses to prescribed forces. In some applications, the desired force-response relationship might be hard to specify exactly, although examples of forces and corresponding…
Soft sleeve actuators (SSAs) have recently been developed as a pneumatic actuation approach for wearable and assistive robotic systems. By integrating the actuation structure into a sleeve-like geometry, these actuators can reduce reliance…
Several numerical methods for measuring the bending rigidity and the spontaneous curvature of fluid membranes are studied using two types of meshless membrane models. The bending rigidity is estimated from the thermal undulations of planar…
How internal forces are transduced into motion through soft, fluid membranes remains a fundamental question in the study of active systems. To investigate this coupling, we develop a minimal system consisting of a single ferromagnetic…
Lipid membranes constitute very particular materials: on the one hand, they break very easily under microscopical stretching; on the other hand, they are extremely flexible, presenting deformations even at small scales. Consequently, a…
A brief review is presented of the scaling of complex fluids, polymers and polyelectrolytes in solution and in confined geometry, in thermodynamical, structural and rheology properties using equilibrium and nonequilibrium dissipative…
Spherical symmetry is ubiquitous in nature. It's therefore unfortunate that spherical system simulations are so hard, and require complete spheres with millions of interacting particles. Here we introduce an approach to model spherical…