Related papers: Programming strain-stiffening in soft composites v…
Phase separation within polymer networks plays a central role in shaping the structure and mechanics of both synthetic materials and living cells, including the formation of biomolecular condensates within cytoskeletal networks. Previous…
Soft interfaces formed by lipid membranes are fundamental to living cells, synthetic cells, and membrane-based soft materials. However, a quantitative framework linking molecular organization with nonlinear interfacial mechanics remains…
A growing body of research indicates that structural plasticity mechanisms are crucial for learning and memory consolidation. Starting from a simple phenomenological model, we exploit a mean-field approach to develop a theoretical framework…
Static and dynamic analysis of the fracture tests of fiber composites in hydraulically servo-controlled testing machines currently in use shows that their grips are much too soft and light for observing the postpeak softening. Based on…
Soft materials capable of large inelastic deformation play an essential role in high-performance nacre-inspired architectured materials with a combination of stiffness, strength and toughness. The rigid "building blocks" made from glass or…
The macroscopic response of short fiber reinforced composites is dependent on an extensive range of microstructural parameters. Thus, micromechanical modeling of these materials is challenging and in some cases, computationally expensive.…
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…
Dense suspensions of particles dispersed in liquids are central to industrial and geophysical processes and serve as model systems for out-of-equilibrium soft matter. At high particle concentrations, they exhibit stress-dependent rheology,…
Deformation due to embedded fluidic networks is currently studied in the context of soft-actuators and soft-robotics. Expanding on this concept, beams can be designed so that the pressure in the channel-network is created directly from…
We consider materials whose mechanical integrity is the result of a jamming process. We argue that such media are generically "fragile": unable to support certain types of incremental loading without plastic rearrangement. Fragility is…
Simulated configurations of flexible knotted rings confined inside a spherical cavity are fed into long-short term memory neural networks (LSTM NNs) designed to distinguish knot types. The results show that they perform well in knot…
The interplay of nematic order and phase separation in solutions of semiflexible polymers in solvents of variable quality is investigated by density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We studied coarse-grained…
We report on a cellular pattern which spontaneously forms at the surface of a thin layer of a cohesive granular material submitted to in-plane stretching. We present a simple model in which the mechanism responsible of the instability is…
Long, elastic filaments cross-linked and deformed by active molecular motors occur in various natural settings. The overall macroscopic mechanical response of such a composite network depends on the coupling between the active and the…
The paper presents a systematic approach for stiffness modeling of manipulators with complex and hybrid structures using matrix structural analysis. In contrast to previous results, it is suitable for mixed architectures containing…
Gels are an increasingly important class of soft materials with applications ranging from regenerative medicine to commodity materials. A major drawback of gels is their relative mechanical weakness, which worsens further under strain. We…
Carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites offer a unique combination of in-plane specific strength and stiffness. They, however, suffer from a relatively poor out-of plane performance. Improving this requires a thorough…
Granular chain packings exhibit a striking emergent strain-stiffening behavior despite the individual looseness of the constitutive chains. Using indentation experiments on such assemblies, we measure an exponential increase in the…
Constitutive equations are derived for the viscoelastic behavior of particle-reinforced rubbers at isothermal loading with finite strains. A filled rubber is thought of as a composite medium where inclusions with high and low concentrations…
We consider disordered solids in which the microscopic elements can deform plastically in response to stresses on them. We show that by driving the system periodically, this plasticity can be exploited to train in desired elastic…