相关论文: Dynamic and programmable cellular-scale granules e…
Soft particulate gels include materials we can eat, squeeze, or 3D print. From foods to bio-inks to cement hydrates, these gels are composed of a small amount of particulate matter (proteins, polymers, colloidal particles, or agglomerates…
Construction throughout history typically assumes that its blueprints and building blocks are pre-determined. However, recent work suggests that alternative approaches can enable new paradigms for structure formation. Aleatory…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…
Biological cells are the prototypical example of active matter. Cells sense and respond to mechanical, chemical and electrical environmental stimuli with a range of behaviors, including dynamic changes in morphology and mechanical…
Hyaluronic acid is an abundant polyelectrolyte in the human body that forms extracellular hydrogels in connective tissues. It is essential for regulating tissue biomechanics and cell-cell communication, yet hyaluronan overexpression is…
Nature has exhibited numerous soft-interactive botanical or zoological systems with self-adaptivenss or reconfigurable shape, however, artificial micro/nano materials of same merit are formidable due to material/structural limitations,…
Materials that behave like machines, e.g. functional materials that are able to change shape in response to external stimuli (Bhattacharya and James, 2005), often do so by exploiting phase transitions. Shape memory materials and the tail…
The Dynamic Template model of biological cell membranes and the cytoplasm as spatially organised fluid layers is extended to plant cells, and is shown to offer a feasible shear driven mechanism for the co-alignment of internal and external…
The alignment of fibers and cells in living tissues affect their mechanical properties and functionality. In this context, one can draw an analogy between tissues and nematic liquid crystal elastomers. We explore this analogy by growing…
The mechanical response of cellular materials with spinodal topologies is numerically and experimentally investigated. Spinodal microstructures are generated by the numerical solution of the Cahn-Hilliard equation. Two different topologies…
In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…
Tactile skins made from textiles enhance robot-human interaction by localizing contact points and measuring contact forces. This paper presents a solution for rapidly fabricating, calibrating, and deploying these skins on industrial robot…
This study aims at finding a method for constructing molecular dynamics like models using the formalism of cellular automata for fast simulation of fluid dynamic systems (including compressible phenomena). In as much as the results…
Soft elastic composite materials containing particulate rigid inclusions in a soft elastic matrix are candidates for developing soft actuators or tunable damping devices. The possibility to reversibly drive the rigid inclusions within such…
A combination of cellular contractility and active phase separation in cell-matrix composites is thought to be an enabler of spatiotemporal patterning in multicellular tissues across scales, from somitogenesis to cartilage condensation. To…
The creation of hyaluronic acid (HA)-based materials as biomineralisation scaffolds for cost-effective hard tissue regenerative therapies remains a key biomedical challenge. A non-toxic and simple acellular method to generate specific…
Biomaterial systems have allowed for the in vitro production of complex, emergent tissue behaviors that were not possible with conventional 2D culture systems allowing for analysis of the normal development as well as disease processes. We…
Substituting load-bearing tissues requires hydrogels with rapid processability, excellent mechanical strength and fatigue resistance. Conventional homogeneously polymerized hydrogels with short-chains/excessive branching exhibit low…
Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature and are used extensively in daily life and in industry. The modeling of these materials remains challenging; therefore, finding models with acceptable predictive accuracy that at the same time…