Related papers: Dense suspensions as trainable rheological metaflu…
A fundamental assumption in our understanding of material rheology is that when microscopic deformations are reversible, the material responds elastically to external loads. Plasticity, i.e. dissipative and irreversible macroscopic changes…
Dense amorphous materials exhibit both nonlocal flow cooperativity and pronounced history dependence, yet existing continuum models capture only one of these features at a time. Nonlocal rheologies are intrinsically memoryless, while…
We investigate the dissipative mechanisms exhibited by creased material sheets when subjected to mechanical loading, which comes in the form of plasticity and relaxation phenomena within the creases. After demonstrating that plasticity…
Deep Reinforcement Learning has demonstrated the potential of neural networks tuned with gradient descent for solving complex tasks in well-delimited environments. However, these neural systems are slow learners producing specialized agents…
We study the rheological behaviour of a dense bidispersed suspension varying the relative size of the two dispersed phases. The main outcome of our analysis is that an enhanced flowability (reduced relative viscosity) of the suspension can…
Trainable activation functions, whose parameters are optimized alongside network weights, offer increased expressivity compared to fixed activation functions. Specifically, trainable activation functions defined as ratios of polynomials…
We present a monolithic mechanical metamaterial comprising a periodic arrangement of snapping units with tunable tensile behavior. Under tension, the metamaterial undergoes a large extension caused by sequential snap-through instabilities,…
Differentiable physical networks provide a simple setting in which learning can be studied through the interaction between trainable parameters and physical equilibrium constraints. We investigate sequential learning in differentiable…
Recent progresses in understanding the behavior of dense granular flows are presented. After presenting a bulk rheology of granular materials, I focus on the new developments to account for non-local effects, and on ongoing research…
Dense suspensions are widespread in nature, manufacturing and process engineering. Particle-based simulations have proven to be an invaluable complement to experimental rheological characterisation, serving as a virtual rheometer that…
A unifying framework to describe dense flows of dry, deformable grains is proposed. Perturbative analysis of a granular temperature equation describing flows with contact stresses, supported by the recovery of the nonlocal granular fluidity…
Materials and machines are often designed with particular goals in mind, so that they exhibit desired responses to given forces or constraints. Here we explore an alternative approach, namely physical coupled learning. In this paradigm, the…
The rheological behavior of soft glassy materials basically results from the interplay between shearing forces and an intrinsic slow dynamics. This competition can be described by a microscopic theory, which can be viewed as a…
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…
Suspensions of swimming particles exhibit complex collective behaviors driven by hydrodynamic interactions, showing persistent large-scale flows and long-range correlations. While heavily studied, it remains unclear how such structures…
Many colloidal systems display very non-Newtonian and solid-like behaviour when concentrated, a striking feature being the apparition of a yield stress. After recalling some basics about the interactions between colloidal particles, I…
Soft electronics have recently gathered considerable interest thanks to their bio-mechanical compatibility. An important feature of such deformable conductors is their electrical response to strain. While development of stretchable…
Within the framework of mode-coupling theory, we present a simple model for describing dense assemblies of active (self-propelled) spherical colloidal particles. For isotropic suspensions, we demonstrate that the glass transition is shifted…
Active nematics, formed from a liquid crystalline suspension of active force dipoles, are a paradigmatic active matter system whose study provides insights into how chemical driving produces the cellular mechanical forces essential for…
Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions and liquid crystals are constituted by mesoscopic entities held together by weak forces. Their mechanical moduli are several orders of magnitude lower than those of atomic…