Related papers: Cutting soft materials: how material differences s…

Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions and liquid crystals are constituted by mesoscopic entities held together by weak forces. Their mechanical moduli are several orders of magnitude lower than those of atomic…

One of the trendsetting themes in soft robotics has been the goal of developing the ultimate universal soft robotic gripper. One that is capable of manipulating items of various shapes, sizes, thicknesses, textures, and weights. All the…

We introduce Material Coating, a novel image editing task that simulates applying a thin material layer onto an object while preserving its underlying coarse and fine geometry. Material coating is fundamentally different from existing…

Surface roughness emerges naturally during mechanical removal of material, fracture, chemical deposition, plastic deformation, indentation, and other processes. Here, we use continuum simulations to show how roughness which is neither…

The efficiency of soft particles to stabilize emulsions is examined by measuring their desorption free energy, i.e., the mechanical work required to detach the particle from a fluid interface. Here, we consider rubber-like elastic as well…

Wearable electronics are emerging as essential tools for health monitoring, haptic feedback, and human-computer interactions. While stable contact at the device-body interface is critical for these applications, it remains challenging due…

Soft particles such as microgels and core-shell particles can undergo significant and anisotropic deformations when adsorbed to a liquid interface. This, in turn, leads to a complex phase behavior upon compression. Here we develop a…

Soft adhesive contacts are ubiquitous in nature and are increasingly used in synthetic systems, such as flexible electronics and soft robots, due to their advantages over traditional joining techniques. While methods to study the failure of…

Surgeons normally need surgical scissors and tissue grippers to cut through a deformable surgical tissue. The cutting accuracy depends on the skills to manipulate these two tools. Such skills are part of basic surgical skills training as in…

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…

Elastic deformation of rigid materials with soft coatings (stratified materials) due to lubrication forces can also alter the interpretation of dynamic surface forces measurements and prevent contact formation between approaching surfaces.…

We present a comprehensive review of the physical behavior of yield stress materials in soft condensed matter, which encompass a broad range of materials from colloidal assemblies and gels to emulsions and non-Brownian suspensions. All…

Extreme deformation of soft matter is central to our understanding of the effects of shock, fracture, and phase change in a variety of systems. Yet, despite, the increasing interest in this area, far-from-equilibrium behaviours of soft…

Friction plays a key role in manipulating objects. Most of what we do with our hands, and most of what robots do with their grippers, is based on the ability to control frictional forces. This paper aims to better understand the variability…

Human tactile perception of materials relies on complex multisensory touch cues, yet the relationship between low-level tactile signals and perceptual representations remains poorly understood. This knowledge gap hinders the integration of…

The mechanical properties of soft matter are of great importance in countless applications, in addition of being an active field of academic research. Given the relative ease with which soft materials can be deformed, their non-linear…

Hydrogels have had a profound impact in the fields of tissue engineering, drug delivery, and materials science as a whole. Due to the network architecture of these materials, imbibement with water often results in uniform swelling and…

Mechanical metamaterials made of flexible building blocks can exhibit a plethora of extreme mechanical responses, such as negative elastic constants, shape-changes, programmability and memory. To date, dissipation has largely remained…

The accurate measurement of fracture resistance in elastomers is essential for predicting the mechanical limits of soft devices. Usually, this is achieved by performing tearing or peeling experiments on thin-sheet samples. Here, we show…

Soft elastic composite materials containing particulate rigid inclusions in a soft elastic matrix are candidates for developing soft actuators or tunable damping devices. The possibility to reversibly drive the rigid inclusions within such…