Related papers: Non-uniform deformations in liquid crystalline ela…
Liquid crystal elastomers and glasses can have significant shape change determined by their director patterns. Cones deformed from circular director patterns have non-trivial Gaussian curvature localised at tips, curved interfaces, and…
We investigate the deformation of elastic microcapsules adsorbed at liquid-liquid interfaces. An initially spherical elastic capsule at a liquid-liquid interface undergoes circumferential stretching due to the liquid-liquid surface tension…
In this work we analyze the relation between the multiplicative decomposition $\mathbf F=\mathbf F^{e}\mathbf F^{p}$ of the deformation gradient as a product of the elastic and plastic factors and the theory of uniform materials. We prove…
Unlike hard materials such as metals and ceramics, rubbery materials can endure large deformations due to the large conformational degree of freedom of the crosslinked three-dimensional polymer network. However, the effect of the branching…
We show that the vibrational response of a glassy liquid at finite frequencies can be described by continuum mechanics despite the vast degeneracy of the vibrational ground state; standard continuum elasticity assumes a unique ground state.…
In the present work, the overall nonlinear elastic behavior of a 1D multi-modular structure incorporating possible imperfections at the discrete (micro-scale) level, is derived with respect to both tensile and compressive applied loads. The…
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the fundamental problem of the non-uniform subsonic motion of a point force and line forces in an unbounded, homogeneous, isotropic medium in analogy to the electromagnetic Li\'enard-Wiechert…
The mechanical response of rubbers has been ubiquitously assumed to be only a function of the imposed strain. Using innovative X-ray measurements capturing the three-dimensional spatial volumetric strain fields, we demonstrate that rubbers…
We show that, in the athermal quasi-static deformation of amorphous materials, the onset of failure is accompanied by universal scalings associated with a \emph{divergence} of elastic constants. A normal mode analysis of the non-affine…
The present contribution investigates the well-posedness of a PDE system describing the evolution of a nematic liquid crystal flow under kinematic transports for molecules of different shapes. More in particular, the evolution of the {\em…
When liquid-crystalline elastomers pass through the isotropic-nematic transition, the orientational order parameter and the elastic strain vary rapidly but smoothly, without the expected first-order discontinuity. This broadening of the…
Nematic elastomers are programmable soft materials that display large, reversible and predictable deformation under an external stimulus such as a change in temperature or light. While much of the work in the field has focused on actuation…
A recent study has demonstrated that phase separation in binary liquid mixtures is arrested in the presence of elastic networks and can lead to a nearly uniformly-sized distribution of the dilute-phase droplets. At longer timescales, these…
Recent developments of microscopic mechanical experiments allow the manipulation of individual polymer molecules in two main ways: \textit{uniform} stretching by external forces and \textit{non-uniform} stretching by external fields. Many…
Recent experiments have reported a novel splay nematic phase, which has alternating domains of positive and negative splay. To model this phase, previous studies have considered a 1D splay modulation of the director field, accompanied by a…
Liquid crystal elastomers are rubbery solids that couple liquid crystalline order and deformation. This coupling leads to properties that are attractive for a number of applications in soft robotics and energy absorption. This paper is…
For a given class of materials, \emph{universal deformations} are those deformations that can be maintained in the absence of body forces and by applying solely boundary tractions. For inhomogeneous bodies, in addition to the universality…
We introduce a new class of non-isothermal models describing the evolution of nematic liquid crystals and prove their consistency with the fundamental laws of classical Thermodynamics. The resulting system of equations captures all…
Uniaxial elastomers are characterized by five elastic constants. If their elastic modulus C_5 describing the energy of shear strains in planes containing the anisotropy axis vanishes, they are said to be soft. In spatial dimensions d less…
We derive the effective energy density of thin membranes of liquid crystal elastomers as the Gamma-limit of a widely used bulk model. These membranes can display fine-scale features both due to wrinkling that one expects in thin elastic…