Related papers: Surface energy-driven crumpling transition in a th…
Friction is a ubiquitous phenomenon that greatly affects our everyday lives and is responsible for large amounts of energy loss in industrialised societies. Layered materials such as graphene have interesting frictional properties and are…
We study numerically how multiple deformable capsules squeeze into a constriction. This situation is largely encountered in microfluidic chips designed to manipulate living cells, which are soft entities. We use fully three-dimensional…
X-ray tomography is performed to acquire 3D images of crumpled aluminum foils. We develop an algorithm to trace out the labyrinthian paths in the three perpendicular cross sections of the data matrices. The tangent-tangent correlation…
Hand crumpled paper balls involve intricate structure with a network of creases and vertices, yet show simple scaling properties, which suggests self-similarity of the structure. We investigate the internal structure of crumpled papers by…
Polymer gels are comprised of a three-dimensional, cross-linked network that can typically withstand the mechanical deformation associated with both swelling and de-swelling. Thus, gels can be designed with smart behaviors that require both…
The apparently intractable shape of a fold in a compressed elastic film lying on a fluid substrate is found to have an exact solution. Such systems buckle at a nonzero wavevector set by the bending stiffness of the film and the weight of…
Buckling in compression is the archetype of elastic instability: when compressed along its longest dimension, a thin structure such as a playing card will buckle out-of-plane accommodating the imposed compression without a significant…
Utilizing colloidal probe, lateral force microscopy and simultaneous confocal microscopy, combined with finite element analysis, we investigate the mechanism of static friction for a microparticle on a soft, adhesive surface. We find that…
Long linear polymers in dilute solutions are known to undergo a collapse transition from a random coil (expand itself) to a compact ball (fold itself up) when the temperature is lowered, or the solvent quality deteriorates. A natural model…
The adhesion of a stiff film onto a curved substrate often generates elastic stresses in the film that eventually give rise to its delamination. Here we predict that delamination of very thin films can be dramatically suppressed through…
The stability of a $\beta$-sheeted conformation and its transition into a random coil are studied with a 2D lattice biopolymer model. At low temperature and low external force, the polymer folds back and forth on itself and forms a…
We investigate the shrinkage induced breakup of thin layers of heterogeneous materials attached to a substrate, a ubiquitous natural phenomenon with a wide range of potential applications. Focusing on the evolution of the fragment ensemble,…
We model the formation and evolution of wrinkles in a floating elastic sheet under uniaxial compression. This is a canonical setup in the study of wrinkling, and whilst its static equilibrium configuration is well characterised, its…
Polymerized phantom membranes are revisited using a nonperturbative renormalization group approach. This allows one to investigate both the crumpling transition and the low-temperature, flat, phase in any internal dimension D and embedding…
Motivated by nuclear safety issues, we study the heat transfers in a thin cylindrical fluid layer with imposed fluxes at the bottom and top surfaces (not necessarily equal) and a fixed temperature on the sides. We combine direct numerical…
Spatially confined rigid membranes reorganize their morphology in response to the imposed constraints. A crumpled elastic sheet presents a complex pattern of random folds focusing the deformation energy while compressing a membrane resting…
The buckling of thin elastic sheets is a classic mechanical instability that occurs over a wide range of scales. In the extreme limit of atomically thin membranes like graphene, thermal fluctuations can dramatically modify such mechanical…
Recent experiments and simulations of amorphous solids plastically deformed by oscillatory drive have foundsurprising behavior - for small strain amplitudes the dynamics can be reversible, which is contrary to the usual notion of plasticity…
Cells exert traction forces on compliant substrates and can induce surface instabilities that appear as characteristic wrinkling patterns. Here, we develop a mechanical description of cell-induced wrinkling on soft substrates using a thin…
Soft and frangible materials that remodel under flow can give rise to branched patterns shaped by material properties, boundary conditions, and the time scales of forcing. We present a general theoretical framework for emergent branching in…