Related papers: (Dis)continuous buckling transition in elastic she…
Grip, walk, crawl, and jump. Soft robots are integrated functional structures composed of compliant mechanisms, whose activity spans various industrial applications such as surgery, healthcare, surveillance, and even planetary exploration.…
Dynamic buckling is addressed for complete elastic spherical shells subject to a rapidly applied step in external pressure. Insights from the perspective of nonlinear dynamics reveal essential mathematical features of the buckling…
Bistable shells can reversibly change between two stable configurations with very little energetic input. Understanding what governs the shape and snap-through criteria of these structures is crucial for designing devices that utilize…
We explore the intrinsic dynamics of spherical shells immersed in a fluid in the vicinity of their buckled state, through experiments and 3D axisymmetric simulations. The results are supported by a theoretical model that accurately…
Fitting two different materials is a versatile methodology in manufacturing complex structures. One of the canonical models for fitting is the snap-fit model, in which flexible materials and rigid structures are assembled by pushing their…
Elastic strips provide a canonical system for studying the mechanisms governing elastic shape transitions. Buckling, linear snap-through, and nonlinear snap-through have been observed in boundary-actuated strips and linked to the type of…
Many elastic structures exhibit rapid shape transitions between two possible equilibrium states: umbrellas become inverted in strong wind and hopper popper toys jump when turned inside-out. This snap-through is a general motif for the…
Shell buckling is central in many biological structures and advanced functional materials, even if, traditionally, this elastic instability has been regarded as a catastrophic phenomenon to be avoided for engineering structures. Either way,…
Curvature and mechanics are intimately connected for thin materials, and this coupling between geometry and physical properties is readily seen in folded structures from intestinal villi and pollen grains, to wrinkled membranes and…
Snapping of a slender structure is utilized in a wide range of natural and man-made systems, mostly to achieve rapid movement without relying on muscle-like elements. Although several mechanisms for elastic energy storage and rapid release…
From cell development to space rockets, the mechanical stability of thin shells is crucial across many industrial and natural processes. However, predicting shells' failure properties remains an open challenge, owing to their sensitivity to…
Instability patterns of rolling up a sleeve appear more intricate than the ones of walking over a rug on floor, both characterized as uniaxially compressed soft-film/stiff-substrate systems. This can be explained by curvature effects. To…
Under increasing compression, an unbuckled shell is in a metastable state which becomes increasingly precarious as the buckling load is approached. So to induce premature buckling a lateral disturbance will have to overcome a decreasing…
When a flat elastic strip is compressed along its axis, it is bent in one of two possible directions via spontaneous symmetry breaking and forms a cylindrical arc, a phenomenon well known as Euler buckling. When this cylindrical section is…
We perform finite element simulations to study the impact of defect-defect interactions on the pressure-induced buckling of thin, elastic, spherical shells containing two dimpled imperfections. Throughout, we quantify the critical buckling…
Rotating the clamped ends of a buckled elastica induces a snap-through instability. Predicting the limit point and determining the equilibria at the start and end of the snap are routine computations in the quasi-static setting. The…
In a recent feature article in this journal, co-authored by Gert van der Heijden, I described the static-dynamic analogy and its role in understanding the localized post-buckling of shell-like structures, looking exclusively at integrable…
In this work, we consider the stability of a spherical shell under combined loading from a uniform external pressure and a homogenous natural curvature. Non-mechanical stimuli, such as one that tends to modify the rest curvature of an…
Snap-through occurs in elastic structures when a stable equilibrium configuration becomes unstable, resulting in rapid motion towards a new and distinct stable state. While static analyses of snap-through are well documented, the dynamics…
We performed dynamic pressure buckling experiments on defect-seeded spherical shells made of a common silicone elastomer. Unlike in quasi-static experiments, shells buckled at ostensibly subcritical pressures (i.e. below the…