Related papers: Self-organized adaptive branching in frangible mat…
Soft Glassy Materials (SGM) consist in dense amorphous assemblies of colloidal particles of multiple shapes, elasticity, and interactions, which confer upon them solid-like properties at rest. They are ubiquitously encountered in modern…
Drainage, in which a nonwetting fluid displaces a wetting fluid from a porous medium, is well-studied for media with unchanging solid surfaces. However, many media can be eroded by drainage, with eroded material redeposited in pores…
In Nature, liquids often circulate in channels textured with leaflets, cilia or porous walls that deform with the flow. These soft structures are optimized to passively control flows and inspire the design of novel microfluidic and soft…
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…
The shear rheology of dense colloidal and granular suspensions is strongly nonlinear, as these materials exhibit shear-thinning and shear-thickening, depending on multiple physical parameters. We numerically study the rheology of a simple…
Similar to the notion of h-adaptivity, where the discretization resolution is adaptively changed, I propose the notion of model adaptivity, where the underlying model (the governing equations) is adaptively changed in space and time.…
Topological insulators are materials where current does not flow through the bulk, but along the boundaries, only. They are of particular practical importance, since it is considerably more difficult, by ``conventional'' means, to affect…
Fiberboids are active filaments trapped at the interface of two phases, able of harnessing energy (and matter) fluxes across the interface in order to produce a rolling-like self-propulsion. We discuss several table-top examples and develop…
The possible paralelism existing between phase transitions and fracture in disordered materials, is discussed using the well-known Fiber Bundle Models and a probabilistic approach suited to smooth fluctuations near the critical point. Two…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
Flowing granular materials often abruptly arrest if not driven by sufficient applied stresses. Such abrupt cessation of motion can be economically expensive in industrial materials handling and processing, and is significantly consequential…
Many clays, soils, biological tissues, foods, and coatings are shrinkable, granular materials: they are composed of packed, hydrated grains that shrink when dried. In many cases, these packings crack during drying, critically hindering…
A phase field model of a crack front propagating in a three dimensional brittle material is used to study the fractographic patterns induced by the branching instability. The numerical results of this model give rise to crack surfaces that…
Disordered systems subject to a fluctuating environment can self-organize into a complex history-dependent response, retaining a memory of the driving. In sheared amorphous solids, self-organization is established by the emergence of a…
We demonstrate that branching of the electron flow in semiconductor nanostructures can strongly affect macroscopic transport quantities and can significantly change their dependence on external parameters compared to the ideal ballistic…
Flexible plants, fungi, and sessile animals are thought to reconfigure in the wind and water to reduce the drag forces that act upon them. In strong winds, for example, leaves roll up into cone shapes that reduce flutter and drag when…
Collective adaptive systems are an emerging class of networked computational systems, particularly suited in application domains such as smart cities, complex sensor networks, and the Internet of Things. These systems tend to feature large…
Structural hierarchy, in which materials possess distinct features on multiple length scales, is ubiquitous in nature; diverse biological materials, such as bone, cellulose, and muscle, have as many as ten hierarchical levels. Structural…
The motion of flexible fibers through structured fluidic environments is ubiquitous in nature and industrial applications. Most often, their dynamics results from the complex interplay between internal elastic stresses, contact forces and…
We consider two variational models for transport networks, an urban planning and a branched transport model, in which the degree of network complexity and ramification is governed by a small parameter $\varepsilon>0$. Smaller $\varepsilon$…