Related papers: Cavity Growth in Soft Solids
Recent experiments have shown that surface stresses in soft materials can have a significant strain-dependence. Here we explore the implications of this surface elasticity to show how, and when, we expect it to arise. We develop the…
Soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions, and biological systems, are typically multicomponent mixtures of macromolecules and simpler components (e.g., microions, monomers, solvent) that can assemble into complex…
Crack propagation in viscoelastic materials has been understood with the use of Barenblatt cohesive models by many authors since the 1970's. In polymers and metal creep, it is customary to assume that the relaxed modulus is zero, so that we…
It is known that gas bubbles on the surface bounding a fluid flow can change the coefficient of friction and affect the parameters of the boundary layer. In this paper, we propose a method that allows us to create, in the near-wall region,…
We use a classical analytical and separable elastic energy landscape describing SnO monolayers to estimate the softening of elastic moduli through a mechanical instability occurring at finite temperature in this material. Although not…
Recent progress on studies of the nanoscale mechanical responses in disordered systems has highlighted a strong degree of heterogeneity in the elastic moduli. In this contribution, using computer simulations, we study the elastic…
Icosahedral shells undergo a buckling transition as the ratio of Young's modulus to bending stiffness increases. Strong bending stiffness favors smooth, nearly spherical shapes, while weak bending stiffness leads to a sharply faceted…
We show numerically that the response of simple amorphous solids (elastic networks and particle packings) to a local force dipole is characterized by a lengthscale $\ell_c$ that diverges as unjamming is approached as $\ell_c \sim (z -…
Experiments with acoustic waves guided along the mechanically free surface of an unconsolidated granular packed structure provide information on the elasticity of granular media at very low pressures that are naturally controlled by the…
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…
Many soft jammed materials, such as pastes, gels, concentrated emulsions, and suspensions, possess a threshold stress, known as yield stress, that must be exceeded to cause permanent deformation or flow. In rheology, the term plastic flow…
An initial stress within a solid can arise to support external loads or from processes such as thermal expansion in inert matter or growth and remodelling in living materials. For this reason it is useful to develop a mechanical framework…
Systems of soft-core particles interacting via a two-scale potential are studied. The potential is responsible for peaks in the structure factor of the liquid state at two different but comparable length scales, and a similar bimodal…
We suggest a scalar model for deformation and flow of an amorphous material such as a foam or an emulsion. To describe elastic, plastic and viscous behaviours, we use three scalar variables: elastic deformation, plastic deformation rate and…
Real-world solids, such as rocks, soft tissues, and engineering materials, are often under some form of stress. Most real materials are also, to some degree, anisotropic due to their microstructure, a characteristic often called the…
Accurate determination of high strain rate (> 10^3 1/s) constitutive properties of soft materials remains a formidable challenge. Albeit recent advancements among experimental techniques, in particular inertial microcavitation rheometry…
The equilibrium shape of liquid drops on elastic substrates is determined by minimising elastic and capillary free energies, focusing on thick incompressible substrates. The problem is governed by three length scales: the size of the drop…
When tensioned, ordinary materials expand along the direction of the applied force. Here, we explore network concepts to design metamaterials exhibiting negative compressibility transitions, during which a material undergoes contraction…
The formation and destabilisation of viscoelastic filaments are of importance in many industrial and biological processes. Filament instabilities have been observed for viscoelastic fluids but recently also for soft elastic solids. In this…
Soft materials with layered structure such as membranes, block copolymers, and smectics exhibit intriguing morphologies with nontrivial curvatures. We report on restructuring the Gaussian and mean curvatures of smectic A films with free…