Related papers: An Experimental Characterization of Mechanical Lay…

Quasi-2D bidisperse amorphous systems of steel beads are fluidized by a uniform upflow of air, so that the beads roll on a horizontal plane. The short-time ballistic motion of the beads is stochastic, with non-Gaussian speed distributions…

Layer formation in a thermally destabilized fluid with stable density gradient has been observed in laboratory experiments and has been proposed as a mechanism for mixing molecular weight in late stages of stellar evolution in regions which…

Curved thin sheets are ubiquitously found in nature and manmade structures. Within the framework of classical thin plate theory, the stiffness of thin sheets is independent of its bending state. This assumption, however, goes against…

We perform molecular dynamics simulations to characterize the occurrence of inhomogeneous shear flows in soft jammed materials. We use rough walls to impose a simple shear flow and study the athermal motion of jammed assemblies of soft…

There are two main classes of physics-based models for two-dimensional cellular materials: packings of repulsive disks and the vertex model. These models have several disadvantages. For example, disk interactions are typically a function of…

Thick adhesive layers have potential structural application in ship construction for the joining of a composite superstructure to a steel hull. The purpose of this study is to develop a mechanics model for the adhesive fracture of such lap…

Quadruped robots are proliferating in industrial environments where they carry sensor payloads and serve as autonomous inspection platforms. Despite the advantages of legged robots over their wheeled counterparts on rough and uneven…

Reinforcement-learned locomotion enables legged robots to perform highly dynamic motions but often accompanies time-consuming manual tuning of joint stiffness. This paper introduces a novel control paradigm that integrates variable…

Solids deform and fluids flow, but soft glassy materials, such as emulsions, foams, suspensions, and pastes, exhibit an intricate mix of solid and liquid-like behavior. While much progress has been made to understand their elastic (small…

The mechanical properties of biological materials are spatially heterogeneous. Typical tissues are made up of a spanning fibrous extracellular matrix in which various inclusions, such as living cells, are embedded. While the influence of…

Collective cell motility is crucial to many biological processes including morphogenesis, wound healing, and cancer invasion. Recently, the biology and biophysics communities have begun to use the term cell jamming to describe the…

We investigate the mechanics of two asymmetric ribbons bound at one end and pulled apart at the other ends. We characterize the elastic junction near the bonding and conceptualize it as a bending boundary layer. While the size of this…

We poorly understand the properties of amorphous systems at small length scales, where a continuous elastic description breaks down. This is apparent when one considers their vibrational and transport properties, or the way forces propagate…

Confinement of a slender body into a granular array induces stress localization in the geometrically nonlinear structure, and jamming, reordering, and vertical dislocation of the surrounding granular medium. By varying the initial packing…

While the large majority of theoretical and numerical studies of the jamming transition consider athermal packings of purely repulsive spheres, real complex fluids and soft solids generically display attraction between particles. By…

The design of desired behaviors in mechanical metamaterials has produced remarkable advances but has generally neglected two aspects - the inevitable presence of undesired behaviors and the role of dynamics in avoiding such behaviors.…

For thin networked materials, which are spatial discrete structures constructed by continuum components, a paradox on the effective thickness defined by the in-plane and out-of-plane stiffnesses is found, i.e. the effective thickness is not…

Gear box dynamics is characterised by a periodically changing stiffness. In real gear systems, a backlash also exists that can lead to a loss in contact between the teeth. Due to this loss of contact the gear has piecewise linear stiffness…

We introduce a new model to study the effect of surface roughness on the jamming transition. By performing numerical simulations, we show that for a smooth surface, the jamming transition density and the contact number at the transition…

Dynamic jamming is a phenomenon whereby a dense suspension switches from a fluid-like to a solid-like state when subjected to sufficient stress and deformation. Large enough systems show that this transition is accompanied by a distinct…