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Hydrophobic nanoporous materials can be intruded by water only by exerting an external action, typically increasing pressure. For some materials, water extrudes when the pressure is lowered again. Controlling intrusion/extrusion hysteresis…
Solutions of macromolecules can undergo liquid-liquid phase separation to form droplets with ultra-low surface tension. Droplets with such low surface tension wet and spread over common surfaces such as test tubes and microscope slides,…
Fibre-reinforced hydrogels are promising materials for biomedical applications due to their strength, toughness, and tunability. However, it remains unclear how to design fibre-reinforced hydrogels for use in specific applications due to…
Recent experiments on vesicles formed from block copolymers with liquid-crystalline side-chains reveal a rich variety of vesicle morphologies. The additional internal order ("structure") developed by these self-assembled block copolymer…
Mixture quality plays a crucial role in the physical properties of multi-component immiscible polymer mixtures including nanocomposites and polymer blends. Such complex mixtures are often characterized by hierarchical internal structures,…
Over the past two decades polymer nanocomposites have received tremendous interest from industry and academia due to their advanced properties comparative to polymer blends. Many computational studies have revealed that the macroscopic…
Collagen type I is well-known for its outstanding mechanical properties which it inherits from its hierarchical structure. Collagen type I fibrils may be viewed as an heterogeneous material made of protein, macromolecules (such as…
We study the dynamics of neutral and charged rods embedded in varying-section channels. By means of systematic approximations, we derive the dependence of the local diffusion coefficient on both the geometry and charge of the rods. This…
Cells offer numerous inspiring examples where proteins and membranes combine to form complex structures that are key to intracellular compartmentalization, cargo transport, and specialization of cell morphology. Despite this wealth of…
We introduce structural heterogeneity, a new topological characteristic for semi-ordered materials that captures their degree of organisation at a mesoscopic level and tracks their time-evolution, ultimately detecting the order-disorder…
We examine the phase transition of polymer adsorption as well as the underlying kinetics of polymer binding from dilute solutions on a structureless solid surface. The emphasis is put on the properties of regular multiblock copolymers,…
Understanding how pore structure influences flow and transport behaviour in granular materials is essential for addressing a wide range of geotechnical, hydraulic, and environmental challenges. These processes are largely shaped by the…
While recent efforts have shown how local structure plays an essential role in the dynamic heterogeneity of homogeneous glass-forming materials, systems containing interfaces such as thin films or composite materials remain poorly…
Molecular self-assembly plays a very important role in various aspects of technology as well as in biological systems. Governed by the covalent, hydrogen or van der Waals interactions - self-assembly of alike molecules results in a large…
Polyelectrolyte (PE) brushes have ubiquitous applications as surface modifiers which regulate various structural and dynamic properties. Here, we apply a continuous-space self-consistent field theory to study the structural heterogeneity in…
Directed and heterogeneous hypergraphs capture directional higher-order interactions with intrinsically asymmetric functional dependencies among nodes. As a result, damage to certain nodes can suppress entire hyperedges, whereas failure of…
Using Monte Carlo simulations, we investigate the self-assembly of model nanoparticles inside a matrix of model equilibrium polymers (or matrix of Wormlike micelles) as a function of the polymeric matrix density and the excluded volume…
Using molecular dynamics simulations we study the static and dynamic properties of spherical nanoparticles (NPs) embedded in a disordered and polydisperse polymer network. Purely repulsive (RNP) as well as weakly attractive (ANP) polymer-NP…
Biomimetic hydrogels based on natural polymers are a promising class of biomaterial, mimicking the natural extra-cellular matrix of biological tissues and providing cues for cell attachment, proliferation and differentiation. With a view to…
The permeability is one of the most fundamental transport properties in soft matter physics, material engineering, and nanofluidics. Here we report by means of Langevin simulations of ideal penetrants in a nanoscale membrane made of a fixed…