Related papers: Programming strain-stiffening in soft composites v…
Soft composite solids are made of inclusions dispersed within soft matrices. They are ubiquitous in nature and form the basis of many biological tissues. In the field of materials science, synthetic soft composites are promising candidates…
Mechanical non-reciprocity-manifested as asymmetric responses to opposing mechanical stimuli-has traditionally been achieved through intricate structural nonlinearities in metamaterials. However, continuum solids with inherent…
Tissues commonly consist of cells embedded within a fibrous biopolymer network. Whereas cell-free reconstituted biopolymer networks typically soften under applied uniaxial compression, various tissues, including liver, brain, and fat, have…
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…
Fibrous networks are ideal functional materials since they provide mechanical rigidity at low weight. Such structures are omnipresent in natural biomaterials from cells to tissues, as well as in man-made materials from polymeric composites…
Living tissues show an extraordinary adaptiveness to strain, which is crucial for their proper biological functioning. The physical origin of this mechanical behaviour has been widely investigated using reconstituted networks of collagen…
Soft biological tissues exhibit a remarkable resilience to large mechanical loads, a property which is associated with the strain stiffening capability of the biopolymer networks that structurally support the tissues. Yet, recent studies…
Filamentous bio-materials such as fibrin or collagen networks exhibit an enormous stiffening of their elastic moduli upon large deformations. This pronounced nonlinear behavior stems from a significant separation between the stiffnesses…
Materials driven far from equilibrium can encode memories of past deformations through long-lived structural reorganisations. Such memory effects-reflecting parameters such as deformation direction, magnitude, and duration have been widely…
We present the experimental studies of highly strained soft bidisperse granular systems made of hyperelastic and plastic particles. We explore the behavior of granular matter deep in the jammed state from local field measurement from the…
Embedding magnetic colloidal particles in an elastic polymer matrix leads to smart soft materials that can reversibly be addressed from outside by external magnetic fields. We discover a pronounced nonlinear superelastic stress-strain…
Inspired by the ubiquity of composite filamentous networks in nature we investigate models of biopolymer networks that consist of interconnected floppy and stiff filaments. Numerical simulations carried out in three dimensions allow us to…
Repeated/cyclic shearing can drive amorphous solids to a steady-state encoding a memory of the applied strain amplitude. However, recent experiments find that the effect of such memory formation on the mechanical properties of the bulk…
In this contribution, we present a new Materials Knowledge System framework for microstructure-sensitive predictions of effective stress--strain responses in composite materials. The model is developed for composites with a wide range of…
The shear response of soft solids can be modeled with linear elasticity, provided the forcing is slow and weak. Both of these approximations must break down when the material loses rigidity, such as in foams and emulsions at their…
This paper presents a combined numerical-theoretical study of the macroscopic behavior and local field distributions in a special class of two-dimensional periodic composites with viscoplastic phases. The emphasis is on strongly nonlinear…
Frictional contact has been extensively studied as the core underlying behavior of legged locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous nature makes planning and control difficult even when an accurate model of the robot is…
Organisms in nature, such as Cephalopods and Pachyderms, exploit stiffness modulation to achieve amazing dexterity in the control of their appendages. In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of layer jamming, which is a popular stiffness…
We study the mechanical stiffening behavior in two-dimensional (2D) cross-linked networks of semiflexible biopolymer filaments under simple shear. Filamental constituents immersed in a fluid undergo thermally excited bending motions.…
Systems driven far from equilibrium often retain structural memories of their processing history. This memory has, in some cases, been shown to dramatically alter the material response. For example, work hardening in crystalline metals can…