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Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft phase-changing solids that exhibit large reversible contractions upon heating, Goldstone-like soft modes and resultant microstructural instabilities. We heat a planar LCE slab to isotropic, clamp…
Thin elastic sheets appear in systems ranging from graphene to biological membranes, where phenomena such as wrinkling, folding, and thermal fluctuations originate from geometric nonlinearities. These effects are treated within weakly…
The equations of motion governing small elastic oscillations of materials, induced by gravitational waves, are derived from the general framework of Carter and Quintana. In transverse-traceless gauge, no bulk forces are present, and the…
We study the static equilibrium of an elastic sphere held in a rigid groove by gravity and frictional contacts, as determined by contact mechanics. As a function of the opening angle of the groove and the tilt of the groove with respect to…
Flow in soft materials encompasses a wide range of viscous, plastic and elastic phenomena which provide challenges to modelling at the microscopic level. To create a controlled flow, we perform falling ball viscometry tests on packings of…
We use numerical simulations to show how noninteracting hard particles binding to a deformable elastic shell may self-assemble into a variety of linear patterns. This is a result of the nontrivial elastic response to deformations of shells.…
Large deformations of soft elastic beads spinning at high angular velocity in a denser background fluid are investigated theoretically, numerically, and experimentally using millimeter-size polyacrylamide hydrogel particles introduced in a…
An adhesively stressed thin film of a soft hydrogel confined between two rigid flat substrates auto-roughens with its dominant wavelength exhibiting pronounced dependence on the film thickness (H). A linear stability analysis confirmed that…
The asymptotic behaviour of the equilibrium configurations of a thin elastic plate is studied, as the thickness $h$ of the plate goes to zero. More precisely, it is shown that critical points of the nonlinear elastic functional $\mathcal…
The balance between stretching and bending deformations characterizes shape transitions of thin elastic sheets. While stretching dominates the mechanical response in tension, bending dominates in compression after an abrupt buckling…
We formulate a phenomenological elasto-plastic theory to describe a solid undergoing a structural transition from a square (p4mm) to an oblique (p2) lattice in two dimensions. Within our theory, the components of the strain may be…
We model the progressive maturation of a heterogeneous mass towards a gravity-driven instability, characterized by the competition between frictional sliding and tension cracking, using array of slider blocks on an inclined basal surface,…
We present an experimental method to fabricate centimetric thin elastic capsules with highly uniform thickness and negligible bending stiffness using silicone elastomers. In our experiments, the capsules thickness is tunable at fabrication,…
A submerged finite cylinder moving under its own weight along a soft incline lifts off and slides at a steady velocity while also spinning. Here, we experimentally quantify the steady spinning of the cylinder and show theoretically that it…
We develop an energy-landscape based elasto-plastic model to understand the behaviour of amorphous solids under uniform and cyclic shear. Amorphous solids are modeled as being composed of mesoscopic sub-volumes, each of which may occupy…
Crumpling of a thin film leads to a unique stiff yet lightweight structure. The stiffness has been attributed to a complex interplay between four basic elements - smooth bends, sharp folds, localized points (developable cones), and…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…
Spatial heterogeneity in the elastic properties of soft random solids is investigated via a two-pronged approach. First, a nonlocal phenomenological model for the elastic free energy is examined. This features a quenched random kernel,…
The choice of elastic energies for thin plates and shells is an unsettled issue with consequences for much recent modeling of soft matter. Through consideration of simple deformations of a thin body in the plane, we demonstrate that four…
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…