Related papers: Evolution of Adaptive Force Chains in Reconfigurab…
Understanding how to produce forces using biomolecular building blocks is essential for the development of adaptive synthetic cells and living materials. Here we ask whether a dynamic polymer system can generate deformation forces in soft…
The control of granular materials, showing up in many industrial applications, is a challenging open research problem. Granular material systems are complex-behavior (as they could have solid-, fluid-, and gas-like behaviors) and…
Pour sand into a container and only the grains near the top surface move. The collective motion associated with the translational and rotational energy of the grains in a thin flowing layer is quickly dissipated as friction through…
Granular materials are involved in most industrial and environmental processes, as well as many civil engineering applications. Although significant advances have been made in understanding the statics and dynamics of cohesionless grains…
The structure and degree of order in soft matter and other materials is intimately connected to the nature of the interactions between the particles. One important research goal is to find suitable control mechanisms, to enhance or suppress…
By means of contact dynamic simulations, we investigate the contact network topology and force chains in two-dimensional packings of elongated particles modeled by rounded-cap rectangles. The morphology of large packings of elongated…
We numerically study the effect of inter-particle friction coefficient on the response to cyclical pure shear of spherical particles in three dimensions. We focus on the rotations and translations of grains and look at the spatial…
We propose a highly coarse-grained simulation model for crystalline polymer solids with crystalline lamellar structures. The mechanical properties of a crystalline polymer solid are mainly determined by the crystalline lamellar structures.…
Differentiable physics modeling combines physics models with gradient-based learning to provide model explicability and data efficiency. It has been used to learn dynamics, solve inverse problems and facilitate design, and is at its…
Constitutive equations are derived for the viscoelastic behavior of particle-reinforced rubbers at isothermal loading with finite strains. A filled rubber is thought of as a composite medium where inclusions with high and low concentrations…
Magnetic soft continuum robots are capable of bending with remote control in confined space environments, and they have been applied in various bioengineering contexts. As one type of ferromagnetic soft continuums, the Magnetically Induced…
We experimentally study nonlinear force propagation into granular material during impact from an intruder, and we explain our observations in terms of the nonlinear grain-scale force relation. Using high-speed video and photoelastic…
The transmission of forces through a disordered granular system is studied by means of a geometrical-topological approach that reduces the granular packing into a set of layers. This layered structure constitutes the skeleton through which…
We analyze the isotropic compaction of assemblies composed of soft pentagons interacting through classical Coulomb friction via numerical simulations. The effect of the initial particle shape is discussed by comparing packings of pentagons…
We investigate the mechanical properties of amorphous polymers by means of coarse-grained simulations and nonaffine lattice dynamics theory. A small increase of polymer chain bending stiffness leads first to softening of the material, while…
This study investigates computationally the impact of particle size disparity and cohesion on force chain formation in granular media. The granular media considered in this study are bi-disperse systems under uniaxial compression,…
Polymers are a versatile class of materials with widespread industrial applications. Advanced computational tools could revolutionize their design, but their complex, multi-scale nature poses significant modeling challenges. Conventional…
We study the elastic properties of a single A/B copolymer chain with a specific sequence. We predict a rich structure in the force extension relations which can be addressed to the sequence. The variational method is introduced to probe…
Changes in the mechanical properties of granular materials, induced by variations in the intrinsic compressibility of the particles, are investigated by means of numerical simulations based on the combination of the Finite Element and…
We explore the locomotion of soft robots in granular medium (GM) resulting from the elastic deformation of slender rods. A low-cost, rapidly fabricable robot inspired by the physiological structure of bacteria is presented. It consists of a…