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Dry granular materials consist of a vast ensemble of discrete solid particles, interacting through complex frictional forces at the contact points. The particles are so large that these systems are believed to be completely athermal. Here,…
In this contribution, cylindrical samples consisting of monodisperse soft (rubber) and stiff (glass) particles are pre-stressed under uniaxial compression. Acoustic P-waves at ultrasound frequencies are superimposed into prepared samples…
In the perspective of developing smart hybrid materials with customized features, ferrogels and magnetorheological elastomers allow a synergy of elasticity and magnetism. The interplay between elastic and magnetic properties gives rise to a…
Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at high packing fraction. This non-equilibrium phase transition is best understood in the context of a model system in which particles repel elastically when they overlap. Recently,…
We analyze the dynamics of a 3D granular packing composed of particles of irregular polyhedral shape confined inside a rectangular box with a retaining wall sub jected to horizontal harmonic forcing. The simulations are performed by means…
Biological locomotion in nature is often achieved by the interaction between a flexible body and its surrounding medium. The interaction of a flexible body with granular media is less understood compared with viscous fluids partially due to…
We study the magneto-elastic coupling behavior of paramagnetic chains in soft polymer gels exposed to external magnetic fields. To this end, a laser scanning confocal microscope is used to observe the morphology of the paramagnetic chains…
We propose a new model for the description of complex granular particles and their interaction in molecular dynamics simulations of granular material in two dimensions. The grains are composed of triangles which are connected by deformable…
Polycrystalline materials can be viewed as composites of crystalline particles or grains separated from one another by thin amorphous grain boundary (GB) regions. While GB have been exhaustively investigated at low temperatures, where these…
We show that neural networks trained by evolutionary reinforcement learning can enact efficient molecular self-assembly protocols. Presented with molecular simulation trajectories, networks learn to change temperature and chemical potential…
We consider a stiff polymer chain in poor solvent and apply a force at one end of the chain. We find that by varying the stiffness parameter, polymer undergoes a transition from the globule state to the folded like state. The conformation…
Magnetic gels with embedded micro/nano-sized magnetic particles in crosslinked polymer networks can be actuated by external magnetic fields, with changes in their internal microscopic structures and macroscopic mechanical properties. We…
We measure experimentally the rearrangements due to a small localized cyclic displacement applied to a packing of rigid grains under gravity in a 2D geometry. We analyze the evolution of the response to this perturbation by considering the…
Granular packings slowly driven towards their instability threshold are studied using a digital imaging technique as well as a nonlinear acoustic method. The former method allows us to study grain rearrangements on the surface during the…
Mechanical metamaterials are structures designed to exhibit an exotic response, such as topological soft modes at a surface. Here we explore single-material 3D prints of these topological structures by translating a ball-and-spring model…
A protein's function depends critically on its conformational ensemble, a collection of energy weighted structures whose balance depends on temperature and environment. Though recent deep learning (DL) methods have substantially advanced…
Intuition tells us that a rolling or spinning sphere will eventually stop due to the presence of friction and other dissipative interactions. The resistance to rolling and spinning/twisting torque that stops a sphere also changes the…
We perform experimental and numerical studies of a granular system under cyclic-compression to investigate reversibility and memory effects. We focus on the quasi-static forcing of dense systems, which is most relevant to a wide range of…
Living organisms can demonstrate highly adaptable and sophisticated responses using memory resulting from repeated exposure to external conditions or training. However, realizing similar adaptability in mechanical responses in inanimate,…
Discrete element (DEM) simulations demonstrate that granular materials are non-simple, meaning that the incremental stiffness of a granular assembly depends on the gradients of the strain increment as well as on the strain increment itself.…