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Large-scale force generation is essential for biological functions such as cell motility, embryonic development, and muscle contraction. In these processes, forces generated at the molecular level by motor proteins are transmitted by…
Understanding and controlling the shape of thin, soft objects has been the focus of significant research efforts among physicists, biologists, and engineers in the last decade. These studies aim to utilize advanced materials in novel,…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
The design of desired behaviors in mechanical metamaterials has produced remarkable advances but has generally neglected two aspects - the inevitable presence of undesired behaviors and the role of dynamics in avoiding such behaviors.…
Understanding cellular response to mechanical forces is immensely important for a plethora of biological processes. Focal adhesions are multi-molecular protein assemblies that connect the cell to the extracellular matrix and play a pivotal…
Problems of flexible mechanical metamaterials, and highly deformable porous solids in general, are rich and complex due to nonlinear mechanics and nontrivial geometrical effects. While numeric approaches are successful, analytic tools and…
The behaviour and fate of tissue cells is controlled by the rigidity and geometry of their adhesive environment, possibly through forces localized to sites of adhesion. We introduce a mechanical model that predicts cellular force…
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…
The process of self-morphing in curved surfaces found in nature, such as with the growth of flowers and leaves, has generated interest in the study of self-morphing bilayers, which has been used in many soft robots or switchers. However,…
Active materials take advantage of their internal sources of energy to self-organize in an automated manner. This feature provides a novel opportunity to design micron-scale machines with minimal required control. However, self-organization…
When transported in confined geometries rigid fibers show interesting transport dynamics induced by friction with the top and bottom walls. Fiber flexibility causes an additional coupling between fiber deformation and transport and is…
Flexible slender structures such as rods, ribbons, plates, and shells exhibit extreme nonlinear responses bending, twisting, buckling, wrinkling, and self contact, that defy conventional simulation frameworks. Discrete Differential Geometry…
Real-world applications of computational fluid dynamics often involve the evaluation of quantities of interest for several distinct geometries that define the computational domain or are embedded inside it. For example, design optimization…
Spinodal metamaterials, with architectures inspired by natural phase-separation processes, have presented a significant alternative to periodic and symmetric morphologies when designing mechanical metamaterials with extreme performance.…
Using numerical simulations it is shown that a jammed, random pack of soft frictional grains can store an arbitrary waveform that is applied as a small time-dependent shear while the system is slowly compressed. When the system is…
Flow-induced failure of granular materials is relevant to a broad range of geomechanical applications. Plasticity, which is the inherent failure mechanism of most granular materials, enables large deformations that can invalidate linearised…
The reaction-diffusion models have been extensively applied to explain the mechanism of pattern formations in early embryogenesis based on geometrically confined microtissues consisting of human pluripotent stem cells. Recently, mechanical…
Robotic fabric manipulation is challenging due to the infinite dimensional configuration space, self-occlusion, and complex dynamics of fabrics. There has been significant prior work on learning policies for specific deformable manipulation…
Convergent extension of epithelial tissue is a key motif of animal morphogenesis. On a coarse scale, cell motion resembles laminar fluid flow; yet in contrast to a fluid, epithelial cells adhere to each other and maintain the tissue layer…
An intrinsic feature of disordered and out-of-equilibrium materials, such as glasses, is the dependence of their properties on their history. An important example is rheological memory, in which disordered solids obtain properties based on…