Related papers: Order and disorder in columnar joints
Columnar jointing is a fracture pattern common in igneous rocks in which cracks self-organize into a roughly hexagonal arrangement, leaving behind an ordered colonnade. We report observations of columnar jointing in a laboratory analog…
When cracks form in a thin contracting layer, they sequentially break the layer into smaller and smaller pieces. A rectilinear crack pattern encodes information about the order of crack formation, as later cracks tend to intersect with…
We present a model that explains the origin and predicts the statistical properties of columnar quasi-hexagonal crack patterns, as observed in the columnar jointing of basaltic lava flows. Irregular fractures appear at the surface of the…
Collagen forms the structural scaffold of connective tissues in all mammals. Tissues are remarkably resistant against mechanical deformations because collagen molecules hierarchically self-assemble in fibrous networks that stiffen with…
The formation of three-dimensional prismatic cracks in the drying process of starch-water mixtures is investigated numerically. We assume that the mixture is an elastic porous medium which possesses a stress field and a water content field.…
Hierarchically structured materials, which possess distinct features on different length scales, are ubiquitous in nature and engineering. In many cases, one structural level may be ordered while another structural level may be disordered.…
Steady state dynamics of clustering, long range order, and inelastic collapse are experimentally observed in vertically shaken granular monolayers. At large vibration amplitudes, particle correlations show only short range order like…
A hexagonal columnar crystal undergoes a shear-melting transition above a critical shear rate or stress. We combine the analysis of the shear-thinning regime below the melting with that of synchrotron X-ray scattering data under shear and…
Capturing the dynamics of granular flows at intermediate length scales can often be difficult. We propose studying the dynamics of contact networks as a new tool to study fracture at intermediate scales. Using experimental three-dimensional…
Starch-water slurries are commonly used to study fracture dynamics. Drying starch-cakes benefit from being simple, economical, and reproducible systems, and have been used to model desiccation fracture in soils, thin film fracture in paint,…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
The sliding columnar phase is a new liquid-crystalline phase of matter composed of two-dimensional smectic lattices stacked one on top of the other. This phase is characterized by strong orientational but weak positional correlations…
Twisted and rope-like assemblies of filamentous molecules are common and vital structural elements in cells and tissue of living organisms. We study the intrinsic frustration occurring in these materials between the two-dimensional…
We study colloidal ordering and disordering on two-dimensional periodic substrates where the number of colloids per substrate minima is two or three. The colloids form dimer or trimer states with orientational ordering, referred to as…
Confinement of a slender body into a granular array induces stress localization in the geometrically nonlinear structure, and jamming, reordering, and vertical dislocation of the surrounding granular medium. By varying the initial packing…
Oscillons are long-lived, slowly radiating solutions of nonlinear classical relativistic field theories. Recently it was discovered that in one spatial dimension their decay may proceed in "staccato" bursts. Here we perform a systematic…
Superficial (two dimensional) crack patterns appear when a thin layer of material elastically attached to a substrate contracts. We study numerically the maturation process undergone by these crack patterns when they are allowed to adapt in…
After a short review on the physics of pulled threads and their mechanical properties, the paper reports and discusses on the strand elongation of disordered columnar phases, hexagonal or lamello-columnar, of small molecules or polymers.…
Dense granular materials and other particle aggregates transmit stress in a manner that belies their microstructural disorder. A subset of the particle contact network is strikingly coherent, wherein contacts are aligned nearly linearly and…
We examine how disordering joint position influences the linear elastic behavior of lattice materials via numerical simulations in two-dimensional beam networks. Three distinct initial crystalline geometries are selected as representative…