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Soft yet tough materials are ubiquitous in nature and everyday life. The ratio between fracture toughness and intrinsic fracture energy of a soft material defines its toughness enhancement. Soft materials' toughness enhancement has been…
Strongly correlated materials are profoundly affected by the repulsive electron-electron interaction. This stands in contrast to many commonly used materials such as silicon and aluminum, whose properties are comparatively unaffected by the…
We investigate the morphology and mechanics of a naturally curved elastic arch loaded at its center and frictionally supported at both ends on a flat, rigid substrate. Through systematic numerical simulations, we classify the observed…
Soft tissue elasticity is directly related to different stages of diseases and can be used for tissue identification during minimally invasive procedures. By palpating a tissue with a robot in a minimally invasive fashion force-displacement…
Deformable colloids and macromolecules adsorb at interfaces, as they decrease the interfacial energy between the two media. The deformability, or softness, of these particles plays a pivotal role in the properties of the interface. In this…
We have designed a new experimental setup able to investigate fracture of soft materials at small scales. At high crack velocity, where energy is mostly dissipated through viscoelastic processes, we observe an increasingly large high strain…
Plasticity modelling has long been based on phenomenological models based on ad-hoc assuption of constitutive relations, which are then fitted to limited data. Other work is based on the consideration of physical mechanisms which seek to…
Our sense of touch is essential and permeates in interactions involving natural explorations and affective communications. For instance, we routinely judge the ripeness of fruit at the grocery store, caress the arm of a spouse to offer…
A huge number of technological and biological systems involves the lubricated contact between rough surfaces of soft solids in relative accelerated motion. Examples include dynamical rubber seals and the human joints. In this study we…
Soft, disordered, micro-structured materials are ubiquitous in nature and industry, and are different from ordinary fluids or solids, with unusual, interesting static and flow properties. The transition from fluid to solid -at the so-called…
Active soft bodies can affect their shape through an internal actuation mechanism that induces a deformation. Similar to recent work, this paper utilizes a differentiable, quasi-static, and physics-based simulation layer to optimize for…
The high-pressure compaction of three dimensional granular packings is simulated using a bonded particle model (BPM) to capture linear elastic deformation. In the model, grains are represented by a collection of point particles connected by…
From human tissue to fruits, many soft materials are coated by a thin layer of a stiffer material. While the primary role of such a coating is often to protect the softer material, the thin, stiff coating also has an important effect on the…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
We study mechanical behavior of soft rubber-like digital materials used in Polyjet multi-material 3D-printing to create deformable composite materials and flexible structures. These soft digital materials are frequently treated as linear…
Understanding surface mechanics of soft solids, such as soft polymeric gels, is crucial in many engineering processes, such as dynamic wetting and adhesive failure. In these situations, a combination of capillary and elastic forces drives…
Flow in soft materials encompasses a wide range of viscous, plastic and elastic phenomena which provide challenges to modelling at the microscopic level. To create a controlled flow, we perform falling ball viscometry tests on packings of…
In recent years, soft robotics simulators have evolved to offer various functionalities, including the simulation of different material types (e.g., elastic, hyper-elastic) and actuation methods (e.g., pneumatic, cable-driven, servomotor).…
The ability of soft matter such as drops and bubbles to change shape dynamically during interaction can give rise to counter-intuitive behaviour that may be expected of rigid materials. Here we show that dimple formation on approach and the…
This article studies the fundamental problem of separating two adhesive elastic fibers based on numerical simulation employing a recently developed finite element model for molecular interactions between curved slender fibers. Specifically,…