Related papers: Mechanical limits of viral capsids
The tensile strength of fused silica fibers is believed to approach its intrinsic value at low temperature, and modern experiments indicate very small, perhaps unmeasured, intrinsic dispersion in this strength. I consider the application of…
Virus binding to a surface results at least locally, at the contact area, in stress and potential structural perturbation of the virus cage. Here we address the question of the role of substrate-induced deformation in the overall virus…
Formation and rupture of vesicles is a fundamental process underlying diverse phenomena in biology, materials science, and biomedical applications. Vesicles form when the area of a growing disk-like membrane exceeds a critical value at…
The dynamic fragmentation of residually stressed solids involves a complex interplay between stored elastic energy, stress wave propagation, and crack instabilities. In this work, we investigate the fracture mechanics of chemically…
The two dimensional incompressible viscous flow past a flapping foil immersed in a uniform stream is studied numerically. Numerical simulations were performed using a Lattice-Boltzmann model for moderate Reynolds numbers. The computation of…
The dynamics of elongated inertial particles in an extensional flow is studied numerically by performing simulations of freely jointed bead-rod chains. The coil-stretch transition and the tumbling instability are characterized as a function…
We study the dependence of the fracture surface energy on the pulling velocity for nano-porous polypropylene (PP) sheets to find two components: the static and dynamic ones. We show that these terms can be interpreted respectively as…
Single-molecule force spectroscopy experiments, as well as a number of other physical systems, are governed by thermally activated transitions out of a metastable state under the action of a steadily increasing external force. The main…
We apply a recently developed model of cytoskeletal force generation to study a cell intrinsic contractility, as well as its response to external loading. The model is based on a non-equilibrium thermodynamic treatment of the…
We study the failure properties of fiber bundles when continuous rupture goes on due to the application of external load on the bundles. We take the two extreme models: equal load sharing model (democratic fiber bundles) and local load…
Fragmentation can be observed in nature and in everyday life on a wide range of length scales and for all kinds of technical applications. Most studies on dynamic failure focus on the behaviour of bulk systems in one, two and three…
The statistical mechanics of a treelike polymer in a confining volume is relevant to the packaging of the genome in RNA viruses. Making use of the mapping of the grand partition function of this system onto the statistical mechanics of a…
We present a statistical mechanics treatment of the stability of globular proteins which takes explicitly into account the coupling between the protein and water degrees of freedom. This allows us to describe both the cold and the warm…
This article describes the various experimental bounds on the variation of the fundamental constants of nature. After a discussion on the role of fundamental constants, of their definition and link with metrology, the various constraints on…
We provide a two dimensional deformation model to describe how soft squishy circular particles respond to external forces and collisions. This model involves formulating mathematical equations and algorithms for the shape of a deformed…
We discover a qualitatively new behavior for systems where the load transfer has limiting stress amplification as in real fiber composites. We find that the disorder is a relevant field leading to tri--criticality, separating a first-order…
In this paper, we present a 2D numerical model developed to simulate the dynamics of soft, deformable particles. To accommodate significant particle deformations, the particle surface is represented as a narrow shell composed of mass points…
We combine experiments with simulations to investigate the fluid-structure interaction of a flexible helical rod rotating in a viscous fluid, under low Reynolds number conditions. Our analysis takes into account the coupling between the…
A thermodynamic measure of the fragility of liquids has recently (Ito et al ref.1) been defined in terms of the temperature dependence of the excess entropy of liquid over crystal, scaled by the excess entropy at the glass transition…
We study the periodic buckling patterns that emerge when elastic shells are subjected to geometric confinement. Residual swelling provides access to range of shapes (saddles, rolled sheets, cylinders, and spherical sections) which vary in…