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Superlattice (SL) thin films composed of refractory ceramics unite extremely high hardness and enhanced fracture toughness; a material combination often being mutually exclusive. While the hardness enhancement obtained whentwo materials…
Crosslinked semi-flexible and flexible filaments that are actively deformed by molecular motors occur in various natural settings, such as the ordered eukaryotic flagellum, and the disordered cytoskeleton. The deformation of these composite…
Biological cells embedded in fibrous matrices have been observed to form inter-cellular bands of dense and aligned fibers, through which they mechanically interact over long distances. Such matrix-mediated cellular interactions have been…
There is growing interest in promoting deformation twinning for plasticity in advanced materials, as highly organized twin boundaries are beneficial to better strength-ductility combination in contrast to disordered grain boundaries.…
We analyze the stretching elasticity of a wormlike chain with a tension discontinuity resulting from a Hookean spring connecting its backbone to a fixed point. The elasticity of isolated semiflexible filaments has been the subject in a…
When objects are packed in a cluster, physical interactions are unavoidable. Such interactions emerge because of the objects geometric features; some of these features promote entanglement, while others create repulsion. When entanglement…
We study the self-healing process of materials with embedded "glue"-carrying cells, in the regime of the onset of the initial fatigue. Three-dimensional numerical simulations within the percolation-model approach are reported. The main…
Strengthening of materials and preventing abrupt fracture are really challenging jobs in the field of engineering and material science. Such problems can be resolved by using composite materials. In this work, we have studied the fracture…
The computational analysis of fiber network fracture is an emerging field with application to paper, rubber-like materials, hydrogels, soft biological tissue, and composites. Fiber networks are often described as probabilistic structures of…
Several experiments have demonstrated the existence of an electro-mechanical effect in many biological tissues and hydrogels, and its actual influence on growth, migration, and pattern formation. Here, to model these interactions and…
Fiber-reinforcement is a universal feature of many biological tissues. It involves the interplay between fiber stiffness, fiber orientation, and the elastic properties of the matrix, influencing pattern formation and evolution in layered…
Motivated by diverse phenomena in cellular biophysics, including bacterial flagellar motion and DNA transcription and replication, we study the overdamped nonlinear dynamics of a rotationally forced filament with twist and bend elasticity.…
Using coarse-grained molecular-dynamics simulations, a generic styrene-(block)-butadiene-(block)-styrene (SBS) triblock copolymer under lamellar conformation is used in order to investigate the mutual entanglement evolution when a structure…
This study addresses ductile fracture of single grains in metals by modeling of the formation and propagation of transgranular cracks. A proposed model integrates gradient extended hardening, phase-field modeling for fracture, and crystal…
In granular media, the presence of even small amounts of interparticle cohesion manifests as an increase in the bulk strength and stiffness, effects that are typically associated with an increase in the average number of constraints per…
Using a minimal model of cells or cohesive cell layers as continuum active elastic media, we examine the effect of substrate thickness and stiffness on traction forces exerted by strongly adhering cells. We obtain a simple expression for…
The effective adhesive properties of heterogeneous thin films are characterized through a combined experimental and theoretical investigation. By bridging scales, we show how variations of elastic or adhesive properties at the microscale…
Remodelling of biological tissue, due to changes in microstructure, is treated in the continuum mechanical setting. Microstructural change is expressed as an evolution of the reference configuration. This evolution is expressed as a…
Micro-structured materials consisting of an array of microstructures are engineered to provide the specific material properties. This present work investigates the design of cellular materials under the framework of level set, so as to…
Hypotheses: Additives are commonly used to tune macromolecular conformational transitions. Among additives, trehalose is an excellent bioprotectant and among responsive polymers, PNIPAM is the most studied material. Nevertheless, their…