Related papers: Cracking in polymer substrates for flexible device…
Brush-like structures emerge from stretching of long polymer chains, densely grafted on to the surface of an impermeable substrate. They arise due to the competition between conformational entropic elasticity of polymer chains and excluded…
Understanding and mitigating the failure of reinforced elastomers has been a long-standing challenge in many industrial applications. In an early attempt to shed light on the fundamental mechanisms of failure, Gent and Park presented a…
Spontaneous spreading of a polymer drop on a solid substrate can be forced by a low pressure gaseous discharge applied between the cathode that supports the drop and a remote electrode. We prone to think that the driving force for this…
The performance of a wide variety of ultra-sensitive devices employing nanoelectromechanical resonators is determined by their mechanical quality factor, yet energy dissipation in these systems remains poorly understood. Here we develop a…
The ideal shock absorber combines high stiffness with high energy absorption whilst retaining structural integrity after impact and is scalable for industrial production. So far no structure meets all of these criteria. Here, we introduce a…
Superlattice (SL) thin films composed of refractory ceramics unite extremely high hardness and enhanced fracture toughness; a material combination often being mutually exclusive. While the hardness enhancement obtained whentwo materials…
The pattern development of multiple cracks in extremely anisotropic solids such as bilayer or multilayer two-dimensional (2D) crystals contains rich physics, which, however, remains largely unexplored. We studied crack interaction across…
Soft materials capable of large inelastic deformation play an essential role in high-performance nacre-inspired architectured materials with a combination of stiffness, strength and toughness. The rigid "building blocks" made from glass or…
Nanoscale polymeric thin films are widely used in diverse applications such as energy devices, flexible electronics and biosensors, where a satisfactory mechanical performance is of vital importance to realize their full functionality. It…
The effective elasticity of highly charged stiff polyelectrolytes is studied in the presence of counterions, with and without added salt. The rigid polymer conformations may become unstable due to an effective attraction induced by…
Rapid progress in additive manufacturing methods has created a new class of ultralight and strong architected metamaterials that resemble periodic truss structures. The mechanical performance of these metamaterials with a very large number…
Thin liquid films on surfaces are part of our everyday life, they serve e.g. as coatings or lubricants. The stability of a thin layer is governed by interfacial forces, described by the effective interface potential, and has been subject of…
Hypothesis: Interfacial instabilities cause undesirable droplet breakage during impact. Such breakage affects many applications, such as printing, spraying, etc. Particle coating over a droplet can significantly change the impact process…
Mechanical metamaterials with engineered failure properties typically rely on periodic unit cell geometries or bespoke microstructures to achieve their unique properties. We demonstrate that intelligent use of disorder in metamaterials…
Dielectric elastomers have recently been proposed for various biologically-relevant applications, in which they may operate in fluidic environments where surface tension effects may have a significant effect on their stability and…
Thermoplastic polyurethanes (TPU) are block copolymeric materials composed of plastomeric "hard" and elastomeric "soft" domains, by which they exhibit highly resilient yet dissipative large deformation features depending on volume fractions…
Assembled monolayers of colloidal particles are crucial for various applications, including opto-electronics, surface engineering, as well as light harvesting, and catalysis. A common approach for self-assembly is the drying of a colloidal…
The most promising solid electrolytes for all-solid-state Li batteries are oxide and sulfide ceramics. Current ceramic solid electrolytes are brittle and lack the toughness to withstand the mechanical stresses of repeated charge and…
Static friction induced by moir\'e superstructure in twisted incommensurate finite layered material interfaces reveals unique double periodicity and lack of scaling with contact size. The underlying mechanism involves compensation of…
A thin circular elastic sheet floating on a drop-like liquid substrate is deformed due to incompatibility between the curved substrate and the planar sheet. We adopt a variational viewpoint by minimizing the non-convex membrane energy…