Related papers: Programming strain-stiffening in soft composites v…

Biopolymer networks are common in biological systems from the cytoskeleton of individual cells to collagen in the extracellular matrix. The mechanics of these systems under applied strain can be explained in some cases by a phase transition…

Multiple model reduction techniques have been proposed to tackle linear and non linear problems. Intrusive model order reduction techniques exhibit high accuracy levels, however, they are rarely used as a standalone industrial tool, because…

Biopolymer networks from the intracellular to tissue scale display high rigidity and tensile stress while having coordinations well below the normal threshold for mechanical rigidity. The elastic filaments in these networks are often…

Solids are distinguished from fluids by their ability to resist shear. In traditional solids, the resistance to shear is associated with the emergence of broken translational symmetry as exhibited by a non-uniform density pattern, which…

We create mechanical metamaterials whose response to uniaxial compression can be programmed by lateral confinement, allowing monotonic, non-monotonic and hysteretic behavior. These functionalities arise from a broken rotational symmetry…

Soft adhesive contacts are ubiquitous in nature and are increasingly used in synthetic systems, such as flexible electronics and soft robots, due to their advantages over traditional joining techniques. While methods to study the failure of…

Non-prehensile manipulation such as pushing is typically subject to uncertain, non-smooth dynamics. However, modeling the uncertainty of the dynamics typically results in intractable belief dynamics, making data-efficient planning under…

We investigate experimentally the mechanical response to shear of a 2D packing of grains across the jamming transition. First, we develop a dedicated experimental setup, together with tracking and photoelastic techniques in order to prepare…

We investigate the jamming transition in packings of emulsions and granular materials via molecular dynamics simulations. The emulsion model is composed of frictionless droplets interacting via nonlinear normal forces obtained using…

Amorphous systems of soft particles above jamming have more contacts than are needed to achieve mechanical equilibrium. The force network of a granular system with a fixed contact network is thus underdetermined, and can be characterized as…

Since the surge of data in materials science research and the advancement in machine learning methods, an increasing number of researchers are introducing machine learning techniques into the next generation of materials discovery, ranging…

Live cells have ambiguous mechanical properties. They were often described as either elastic solids or viscoelastic fluids and have recently been classified as soft glassy materials characterized by weak power-law rheology. Nonlinear…

Investigation of inhomogeneities has wide applications in different areas of mechanics including the study of composite materials. Here, we analytically study an arbitrarily-shaped isotropic inhomogeneity embedded in a finite-sized…

Compliance control is an increasingly employed technique used in the robotic field. It is known that various mechanical properties can be reproduced depending on the design of the stiffness matrix, but the design theory that takes advantage…

Soft, amorphous solids such as tissues, foams, and emulsions are composed of deformable particles. However, the effect of single-particle deformability on the collective behavior of soft solids is still poorly understood. We perform…

Using numerical simulations it is shown that a jammed, random pack of soft frictional grains can store an arbitrary waveform that is applied as a small time-dependent shear while the system is slowly compressed. When the system is…

We use molecular simulations to study jamming of a crumpled bead-spring model polymer in a finite container and compare to jamming of repulsive spheres. After proper constraint counting, the onset of rigidity is seen to occur isostatically…

Ensuring symmetric stiffness in impedance-controlled robots is crucial for physically meaningful and stable interaction in contact-rich manipulation. Conventional approaches neglect the change of basis vectors in curved spaces, leading to…

Networks of stiff fibers govern the elasticity of biological structures such as the extracellular matrix of collagen. These networks are known to stiffen nonlinearly under shear or extensional strain. Recently, it has been shown that such…

Intelligent biological systems are characterized by their embodiment in a complex environment and the intimate interplay between their nervous systems and the nonlinear mechanical properties of their bodies. This coordination, in which the…