Related papers: Jamming, Force Chains and Fragile Matter
Disorder and long-range interactions are two of the key components that make material failure an interesting playfield for the application of statistical mechanics. The cornerstone in this respect has been lattice models of the fracture in…
Two classes of non-linear elastic materials are derived via two-dimensional homogenization. These materials are equivalent to a periodic grid of axially-deformable and axially-preloaded structural elements, subject to incremental…
Granulation is a process whereby a dense colloidal suspension is converted into pasty granules (surrounded by air) by application of shear. Central to the stability of the granules is the capillary force arising from the interfacial tension…
Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions and liquid crystals are constituted by mesoscopic entities held together by weak forces. Their mechanical moduli are several orders of magnitude lower than those of atomic…
Brittle materials fail catastrophically. In consequence of their limited flaw-tolerance, failure occurs by localized fracture and is typically a dynamic process. Recently, experiments on epithelial cell monolayers have revealed that this…
Granular materials jam when developing a network of contact forces able to resist the applied stresses. Through numerical simulations of the dynamics of the jamming process, we show that the jamming transition does not occur when the…
The understanding of dynamic failure in amorphous materials via the propagation of free boundaries like cracks and voids must go beyond elasticity theory, since plasticity intervenes in a crucial and poorly understood manner near the moving…
We use molecular simulations to study jamming of a crumpled bead-spring model polymer in a finite container and compare to jamming of repulsive spheres. After proper constraint counting, the onset of rigidity is seen to occur isostatically…
From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…
Granular systems are not always homogeneous and can be composed of grains with very different mechanical properties. To improve our understanding of the behavior of real granular systems, in this experimental study, we compress 2D…
The consolidation of suspended particulate matter under external forces such as pressure or gravity is of widespread interest. In this work, we derive a constitutive relation to describe the deformation of a {\it two-dimensional} strongly…
The reliability of processes with moving elastic and isotropic material containing initial cracks is considered in terms of fracture. The material is modelled as a moving plate which is simply supported from two of its sides and subjected…
Filamentous bio-materials such as fibrin or collagen networks exhibit an enormous stiffening of their elastic moduli upon large deformations. This pronounced nonlinear behavior stems from a significant separation between the stiffnesses…
Cohesive particles form agglomerates that are usually very porous. Their geometry, particularly their fractal dimension, depends on the agglomeration process (diffusion-limited or ballistic growth by adding single particles or…
The high-pressure compaction of three dimensional granular packings is simulated using a bonded particle model (BPM) to capture linear elastic deformation. In the model, grains are represented by a collection of point particles connected by…
Granular solid hydrodynamics, constructed to describe quasi-elastic and plastic motion of granular solid, is shown also capable of accounting for the rheology of granular dense flow. This makes it a unified, though still qualitative,…
We study how solidification of model freely rotating polymers under athermal quasistatic compression varies with their bond angle $\theta_0$. All systems undergo two discrete, first-order-like transitions: entanglement at $\phi =…
Fractal patterns are observed in computational mechanics of elastic-plastic transitions in two models of linear elastic/perfectly-plastic random heterogeneous materials: (1) a composite made of locally isotropic grains with weak random…
The shear rheology of dense colloidal and granular suspensions is strongly nonlinear, as these materials exhibit shear-thinning and shear-thickening, depending on multiple physical parameters. We numerically study the rheology of a simple…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials are compliant structures engineered to achieve unique properties via the large deformation of their components. While their static character has been studied extensively, the study of their dynamic…