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Natural materials often feature a combination of soft and stiff phases, arranged to achieve excellent mechanical properties, such as high strength and toughness. Many natural materials have even independently evolved to have similar…
Motivated by recent experiments showing nonlinear elasticity of in vitro networks of the biopolymer actin cross-linked with filamin, we present an effective medium theory of flexibly cross-linked stiff polymer networks. We model such…
Fibrous networks such as collagen are common in biological systems. Recent theoretical and experimental efforts have shed light on the mechanics of single component networks. Most real biopolymer networks, however, are composites made of…
The nonlinear response of driven complex materials -- disordered magnets, amorphous media, crumpled sheets -- features intricate transition pathways where the system repeatedly hops between metastable states. % which encode memory effects.…
We have studied the elastic response of actin networks with both compliant and rigid crosslinks by modeling molecular motors as force dipoles. Our finite element simulations show that for compliant crosslinkers such as filamin A, the…
Soft modular robots enable more flexibility and safer interaction with the changing environment than traditional robots. However, it has remained challenging to create deformable connectors that can be integrated into soft machines. In this…
Crumpling an ordinary thin sheet transforms it into a structure with unusual mechanical behaviors, such as enhanced rigidity, emission of crackling noise, slow relaxations, and memory retention. A central challenge in explaining these…
We investigate the cyclic mechanical behavior in uniaxial tension of three different commercial thermoplastic polyurethane elastomers (TPU) often considered as a sustainable replacement for common filled elastomers. All TPU have similar…
Soft living tissues like cartilage can be considered as biphasic materials comprised of a fibrous complex biopolymer network and a viscous background liquid. Here, we show by a combination of experiment and theoretical analysis that both…
Thermally-driven semi-crystalline polymer networks are capable to achieve both the one-way shape-memory effect and two-way shape-memory effect under stress and stress-free conditions, therefore representing an appealing class of polymers…
Semiflexible biopolymer networks are commonly found in biological systems, from the cytoskeleton of cells to the extracellular matrix. Such networks often naturally occur as composites, in which various components interact to generate rich…
Soft electronics have recently gathered considerable interest thanks to their bio-mechanical compatibility. An important feature of such deformable conductors is their electrical response to strain. While development of stretchable…
We report detailed theoretical investigations of the micro-mechanics and bulk elastic properties of composites consisting of randomly distributed stiff fibers embedded in an elastic matrix in two and three dimensions. Recent experiments…
Polymer composites are ideal candidates for next generation biomimetic soft materials because of their exquisite bottom-up designability. However, the richness of behaviours comes at a price: the need for precise and extensive…
We present a machine-learning strategy for finite element analysis of solid mechanics wherein we replace complex portions of a computational domain with a data-driven surrogate. In the proposed strategy, we decompose a computational domain…
Memory encoding by cyclic shear is a reliable process to store information in jammed solids, yet its underlying mechanism and its connection to the amorphous structure are not fully understood. When a jammed sphere packing is repeatedly…
Disordered athermal biopolymer materials, such as collagen networks that constitute a major component in extracellular matrices and various connective tissues, are initially soft and compliant but stiffen dramatically under strain. Such…
Soft, disordered, micro-structured materials are ubiquitous in nature and industry, and are different from ordinary fluids or solids, with unusual, interesting static and flow properties. The transition from fluid to solid -at the so-called…
We present a theory for the elasticity of cross-linked stiff polymer networks. Stiff polymers, unlike their flexible counterparts, are highly anisotropic elastic objects. Similar to mechanical beams stiff polymers easily deform in bending,…
Shape-programmable soft materials that exhibit integrated multifunctional shape manipulations, including reprogrammable, untethered, fast, and reversible shape transformation and locking, are highly desirable for a plethora of applications,…