Related papers: Flow-driven Stretch Fluctuations Cause Anomalous R…
We study the friction between a flat solid surface where polymer chains have been end-grafted and a cross-linked elastomer at low sliding velocity. The contribution of isolated grafted chains' penetration in the sliding elastomer has been…
Polymer chains decorated with a fraction of monomers capable of forming reversible bonds form transient polymer networks that are important in soft and biological systems. If chains are flexible and the attractive monomers are all of the…
Prestrained elastic networks arise in a number of biological and technological systems ranging from the cytoskeleton of cells to tensegrity structures. To understand the response of such a network as a function of the prestrain, we consider…
Network remodeling, or adaptation, in the presence of periodically driven forcings has hereto remained largely unexplored, despite the fact that a broad class of biological transport networks, e.g. animal vasculature, depends on periodic…
Motivated by recent experiments showing that stiff biopolymer gels exhibit highly unusual negative normal elastic stresses, we develop a computational model for stiff polymer networks subject to large strains. In all cases, we find that…
It is becoming more and more clear that complex networks present remarkable large fluctuations. These fluctuations may manifest differently according to the given model. In this paper we re-consider hidden variable models which turn out to…
We identify a class of composite membranes: fluid bilayers coupled to an elastic meshwork, that are such that the meshwork's energy is a function $F_\mathrm{el}[A_\xi]$ \textit{not} of the real microscopic membrane area $A$, but of a…
Semiflexible polymers such as filamentous actin play a vital role in the mechanical behavior of cells, yet the basic properties of cross-linked F-actin networks remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we have performed numerical…
For monodomain nematic elastomers, we construct generalised elastic-nematic constitutive models combining purely elastic and neoclassical-type strain-energy densities. Inspired by recent developments in stochastic elasticity, we extend…
We examine the effects of thermal fluctuations on thin elastic filaments with non-circular cross-section and arbitrary spontaneous curvature and torsion. Analytical expressions for orientational correlation functions and for the persistence…
By means of computer simulations, we investigate the relaxation of the Rouse modes in a simple bead-spring model for non-entangled polymer blends. Two different models are used for the fast component, namely fully-flexible and semiflexible…
Tire wear releases millions of tons of particles annually, bearing immense industrial and environmental impact. However, efforts to mitigate the wear of elastomeric materials remain largely empirical, due to a limited understanding of the…
The fragmentation of small, brittle, flexible, inextensible fibers is investigated in a fully-developed, homogeneous, isotropic turbulent flow. Such small fibers spend most of their time fully stretched and their dynamics follows that of…
We consider a model of an extensible semiflexible filament moving in two dimensions on a motility assay of motor proteins represented explicitly as active harmonic linkers. Their heads bind stochastically to polymer segments within a…
Stretched-exponential relaxation is a widely observed phenomenon found in ordered ferromagnets as well as glassy systems. One modeling approach connects this behavior to a droplet dynamics described by an effective Langevin equation for the…
The dynamics of fibres, modelled as a sequence of inertial beads linked via elastic springs, in turbulent flows is dictated by a non-trivial interplay of their inertia and elasticity. Such elastic, inertial fibres preferentially sample a…
Diverse processes rely on the viscous flow of polymer solutions through porous media. In many cases, the macroscopic flow resistance abruptly increases above a threshold flow rate in a porous medium---but not in bulk solution. The reason…
Using molecular dynamics simulations we examine the dynamics of a family of model polymers with varying chain length and torsional potential barriers. We focus on features of the dynamics of polymers that are seen experimentally but absent…
This study presents a Eulerian theory to elucidate the molecular kinematics in polymer networks and their connection to continuum deformation, grounded in fundamental statistical physics and thermodynamics. Three key innovations are…
Disordered soft materials, such as fibrous networks in biological contexts exhibit a nonlinear elastic response. We study such nonlinear behavior with a minimal model for networks on lattice geometries with simple Hookian elements with…