Related papers: Mechanical Failure of a Small and Confined Solid
Spontaneous strain localization occurs during mechanical tests of a model amorphous solid simulated using molecular dynamics. The degree of localization depends upon the extent of structural relaxation prior to mechanical testing. In the…
Elucidating the interplay of defect and stress at the microscopic level is a fundamental physical problem that has strong connection with materials science. Here, based on the two-dimensional crystal model, we show that the instability mode…
Grain boundaries in extremely confined colloidal smectics possess a topological fine structure with coexisting nematic and tetratic symmetry of the director field. An alternative way to approach the problem of smectic topology is via the…
Understanding failure in nanomaterials is critical for the design of reliable structural materials and small-scale devices that have components or microstructural elements at the nanometer length scale. No consensus exists on the effect of…
We examine the phase behavior of a quasi-one-dimensional system of hard squares with side-length $\sigma$, where the particles are confined between two parallel walls and only nearest neighbor interactions occur. As in our previous work…
The squeezing of soft solids, the constrained growth of biological tissues, and the swelling of soft elastic solids such as gels can generate large compressive stresses at their surfaces. This causes the otherwise smooth surface of such a…
Disordered solids, straddling the solid-fluid boundary, lack a comprehensive continuum mechanical description. They exhibit a complex microstructure wherein multiple meta-stable states exist. Deforming disordered solids induces particles…
Customarily, crystalline solids are defined to be {\em rigid} since they resist changes of shape determined by their boundaries. However, rigid solids cannot exist in the thermodynamic limit where boundaries become irrelevant. Particles in…
We study numerically how multiple deformable capsules squeeze into a constriction. This situation is largely encountered in microfluidic chips designed to manipulate living cells, which are soft entities. We use fully three-dimensional…
We numerically investigate the athermal creep deformation of amorphous materials having a wide range of stability. The imposed shear stress serves as the control parameter, allowing us to examine the time-dependent transient response…
Liquid crystal elastomer films that morph into cones are strikingly capable lifters. Thus motivated, we combine theory, numerics, and experiments to reexamine the load-bearing capacity of conical shells. We show that a cone squashed between…
The capture of a soft spherical particle by a rectangular slit leads to a non-monotonic pressure-flow rate relation at low Reynolds number. In the presence of the trapped particle the flow-induced deformations focus the streamlines and…
The failure of materials and interfaces is mediated by cracks, nearly singular dissipative structures that propagate at velocities approaching the speed of sound. Crack initiation and subsequent propagation -- the dynamic process of…
Stress paths in granular matter often suffer sudden large-scale rearrangements when the system is slightly perturbed, i.e. granular systems are unstable. We show in this paper that the observed instability is due to the minimally rigid, or…
We show that the interaction of a particle with a directionally solidified interface induces the onset of morphological instability provided that the particle-interface distance falls below a critical value. This instability occurs at…
The mechanical strength and flow of granular materials can depend strongly on the shapes of individual grains. We report quantitative results obtained from photoelasticimetry experiments on locally loaded, quasi-two-dimensional granular…
Internal activity can fundamentally reshape the mechanical behavior of solids, yet its role in softening and failure remains incompletely understood. In this study, we investigate spontaneous deformations in activated solids via non-affine…
Classical rupture is attributed to molecular (van der Waals) forces acting at nanometric thicknesses. Nonetheless, micron-thick liquid sheets routinely perforate far above the scale where these molecular forces act, yet the mechanism that…
The preference of thin flat sheets to bend rather than stretch, combined with results from Geometry, mean that changes in a thin sheet's Gaussian curvature are prohibitively expensive. As a result, an imposed curvature in one principal…
The local structure study reveals important aspects of the physical properties, because it is closely related to the electronic structure. Standard crystallographic analysis based on a space group fails to observe disorder in the crystal…