Related papers: Mechanical Failure of a Small and Confined Solid
We use molecular simulations to explore how sample dimensions and interfacial properties impact some generic aspects of the mechanical and structural behavior of nanoconfined materials. Specifically, we calculate the strain-dependent…
When stretched in one direction, most solids shrink in the transverse directions. In soft silicone gels, however, we observe that small-scale topographical features grow upon stretching. A quantitative analysis of the topography shows that…
In the present work the instability of a flat horizontal thin layer of a magnetic fluid (the depth of no more than 50 \mum) under the action of a uniform magnetic field is studied experimentally. It was revealed that the development of…
In a realistic three-dimensional setup, we simulate the slow deformation of idealized granular media composed of spheres undergoing an axisymmetric triaxial shear test. We follow the self-organization of the spontaneous strain localization…
We use a minimal model for a dense suspension undergoing thickening and thinning to investigate microstructural changes in 2d simulations. Our simulations show that in steady flow the contact network contains distinct building blocks which…
Long, shallow microchannels embedded in thick soft materials are widely used in microfluidic devices for lab-on-a-chip applications. However, the bulging effect caused by fluid--structure interactions between the internal viscous flow and…
Adding perforations to a continuum sheet allows new modes of deformation, and thus modifies its elastic behavior. The failure behavior of such a perforated sheet is explored, using a model experimental system: a material containing a…
Previous linear bifurcation analyses have evidenced that an axially stretched soft cylindrical tube may develop an infinite-wavelength (localised) instability when one or both of its lateral surfaces are under sufficient surface tension.…
Liquid water can become metastable with respect to its vapor in hydrophobic confinement. The resulting dewetting transitions are often impeded by large kinetic barriers. According to macroscopic theory, such barriers arise from the free…
We demonstrate that the sequence of distorted commensurate phases observed in tilted chiral smectics is explained by the gain in electrostatic energy due to the lock-in of the unit cell to a number of layers which is the integer closest to…
Fatigue caused by cyclic bending of a piece of material, resulting in its mechanical failure, is a phenomenon that had been studied for ages by engineers and physicists alike. In this Letter we study such fatigue in a strip of athermal…
We study the bulk and shear elastic properties of barely-compressed, "athermal" emulsions and find that the rigidity of the jammed solid fails at remarkably large critical osmotic pressures. The minuscule yield strain and similarly small…
The tensile failure mechanism of Cu-Polyethylene-Cu (CPC) sandwich structure was clarified by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations subjected to a uniaxial tensile loading at microscopic scale. The sensitivity analysis of parameters such as…
The elastic coupling between plastic events is generally invoked to interpret plastic properties and failure of amorphous soft glassy materials. We report an experiment where the emergence of a self-organized plastic flow is observed well…
Motivated by recent experimental observations [U. Delabre et al, Langmuir 24, 3998, 2008] we reconsider an instability of ultrathin nematic films, spread on liquid substrates. Within a continuum elastic theory of liquid crystals, in the…
Concentrated suspensions may shear-thin when the suspended particles form planar sheets that slide over one another with less friction than if the particles are randomly distributed. In a na\"ive model the suspension is described by a mean…
In this Letter we discuss theoretically the instabilities of thermotropic freely standing smectic-A films under shear flow\cite{re:wu}. We show that, in Couette geometry, the centrifugal force pushes the liquid crystal toward the outer…
This paper describes an attempt to construct a first-principles theory of the fracture toughness of crystalline solids. It is based on the thermodynamic dislocation theory (TDT), which starts with the assertion that dislocations in solids…
Stress-strain relations for random packings of entangling chains under triaxial compression can exhibit strain stiffening and sustain stresses several orders-of-magnitude beyond typical granular materials. X-ray tomography reveals the…
Size-dependence of plastic flow is studied by discrete dislocation dynamical simulation of systems with various numbers of interacting linear edge dislocations while the stress is slowly increased. Regions between avalanches in the…