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Mechanical stresses are increasingly found to be associated with various biological functionalities. At the same time, topological defects are being identified across a diverse range of biological systems and are points of localized…
This paper presents an electromechanical analysis of the nonlinear static response and the superimposed small-amplitude wave characteristics in an infinite periodic compressible dielectric elastomer (DE) laminate subjected to electrostatic…
The purpose of this paper is to review some elasticity effects in epitaxial growth. We start by a description of the main ingredients needed to describe elasticity effects (elastic interactions, surface stress, bulk and surface elasticity,…
Soft solids with tunable mechanical response are at the core of new material technologies, but a crucial limit for applications is their progressive aging over time, which dramatically affects their functionalities. The generally accepted…
The stability of organic solar cells is strongly affected by the morphology of the photoactive layers, whose separated crystalline and/or amorphous phases are kinetically quenched far from their thermodynamic equilibrium during the…
The recent discovery of electro-active polymers has shown great promises in the field of soft robotics, and was logically followed by experimental, numerical and theoretical developments. Most of these studies were concerned with systems…
Under externally applied electric fields, lipid membranes tend to permeate and change their electrical resistance by the combined processes of pore creation and pore evolution (expansion or contraction). This study is focused on the pore…
The evolution of various competing cell types in tissues, and the resulting persistent tissue population, is studied numerically and analytically in a particle-based model of active tissues. Mutations change the properties of cells in…
We present a model for mechanically-induced pattern formation in growing biological tissues and discuss its application to the development of leaf venation networks. Drawing an analogy with phase transitions in solids, we use a phase field…
We investigate theoretically the effects of elastic and plastic deformations on heterogeneous nucleation and nanowire formation. In the first case, the influence of the confinement of the critical nucleus between two parallel misfitting…
The electroosmotic flow of non-Newtonian fluids in deformable microchannels is fundamentally important in the understanding of the hydrodynamics in physiological flows. The performance of these microchannels is governed by the load bearing…
Material properties of soft electro-active (SEA) structures are significantly sensitive to external electro-mechanical biasing fields (such as pre-stretch and electric stimuli), which generate remarkable knock-on effects on their dynamic…
Internal activity can fundamentally reshape the mechanical behavior of solids, yet its role in softening and failure remains incompletely understood. In this study, we investigate spontaneous deformations in activated solids via non-affine…
A large electric field is typically present in anodic or passive oxide films. Stresses induced by such a large electric field are critical in understanding the breakdown mechanism of thin oxide films and improving their corrosion…
Biofilms are antibiotic-resistant bacterial aggregates that grow on moist surfaces and can trigger hospital-acquired infections. They provide a classical example in biology where the dynamics of cellular communities may be observed and…
It is widely recognized that reciprocal interactions between cells and their microenvironment, via mechanical forces and biochemical signaling pathways, regulate cell behaviors during normal development, homeostasis and disease progression…
Coupling between axial and torsional degrees of freedom often modifies the conformation and expression of natural and synthetic filamentous aggregates. Recent studies on chiral single-walled carbon nanotubes and B-DNA reveal a reversal in…
Developing tissues often maintain mechanical coherence while continuously remodeling through cellular processes such as cell divisions and rearrangements. In this way, they are an example of amorphous solids. In passive amorphous solids,…
We show that a viscoelastic thin sheet driven out of equilibrium by active structural remodelling develops a rich variety of shapes as a result of a competition between viscous relaxation and activity. In the regime where active processes…
The mechanical properties of biological materials are spatially heterogeneous. Typical tissues are made up of a spanning fibrous extracellular matrix in which various inclusions, such as living cells, are embedded. While the influence of…