Related papers: High Strain Rate Behavior of Liquid Crystal Elasto…
Gels are an increasingly important class of soft materials with applications ranging from regenerative medicine to commodity materials. A major drawback of gels is their relative mechanical weakness, which worsens further under strain. We…
Liquid Crystalline Elastomers (LCEs) are active materials that are of interest due to their programmable response to various external stimuli such as light and heat. When exposed to these stimuli, the anisotropy in the response of the…
We report on the determination of high-pressure elasticity from thermal diffuse x-ray scattering of magnesium oxide at pressures up to 28 GPa. We find that the full elasticity tensor as a function of pressure can be extracted from x-ray…
Stability is an important and fruitful avenue of research for liquid crystal elastomers. At constant temperature, upon stretching, the homogeneous state of a nematic body becomes unstable, and alternating shear stripes develop at very low…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are elastomeric networks with rod-like mesogens that reorient under load. In polydomain LCEs, this reorientation drives a polydomain-to-monodomain transition that produces a soft-elastic plateau. Coupling…
We present an experimental investigation of the non stationary frictional properties of multicontact interfaces between rough elastomers and rough hard glass at low velocities (<= 200 mu m s^{-1}). These systems, for which the deformation…
Liquid crystalline polymers are materials of considerable scientific interest and technological value to society [1-3]. An important subset of such materials exhibit rubber-like elasticity; these can combine the remarkable optical…
We address the physics of nematic liquid crystalline elastomers randomly crosslinked in the isotropic state. To do this, we construct a phenomenological effective replica Hamiltonian in terms of two order-parameter fields: one for the…
Cholesteric liquid crystal elastomers have interesting and potentially very useful photonic properties. In an ideal monodomain configuration of these materials, one finds a Bragg-reflection of light in a narrow wavelength range and a…
Elastic constants and mechanical properties play a pivotal role across multiple disciplines and engineering applications. We introduced the optimized high-efficient strain-matrix set (OHESS) that determines the second-order elastic…
The mechanical properties of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) make them suitable candidates for pressure-sensitive adhesives (PSAs). Using the nematic dumbbell constitutive model, and the block model of PSAs, we study their tack energy and…
We present a detailed analysis of the molecular packing of a strained liquid crystal elastomer composed of chiral mesogens in the smectic A phase. X-ray diffraction patterns of the elastomer collected over a range of orientations with…
Randomly disordered (polydomain) liquid crystalline elastomers align under stress. We study the dynamics of stress relaxation before, during and after the Polydomain-Monodomain transition. The results for different materials show the…
We report an unexpected behavior in wetting dynamics on soft silicone substrates: the dynamics of aqueous droplets deposited on vertical plates of such elastomers exhibits two successive speed regimes. This macroscopic observation is found…
Achieving control and tunability of lyotropic materials has been a long-standing goal of liquid crystal research. Here we show that the elasticity of a liquid crystal system consisting of a dense suspension of semiflexible biopolymers can…
We numerically show that molecules adsorbed in a soft porous crystal form a superlattice (SL) stabilized by elastic interactions. In a mechanically flexible honeycomb lattice model, when the elastic interactions between the next nearest…
We elucidate the polymer dynamics of a liquid crystal elastomer based on the time-dependent response of the pendent liquid crystal mesogens. The molecular tilt and switching time of mesogens are analyzed as a function of temperature and…
We study the elastic response of concentrated suspensions of rigid wire frame particles to a step strain. These particles are constructed from infinitely thin, rigid rods of length $L$. We specifically compare straight rod-like particles to…
Nematic elastomers and glasses deform spontaneously when subjected to temperature changes. This property can be exploited in the design of heterogeneously patterned thin sheets that deform into a non-trivial shape when heated or cooled. In…
Stochastic homogeneous hyperelastic solids are characterised by strain-energy densities where the parameters are random variables defined by probability density functions. These models allow for the propagation of uncertainties from input…