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Tissue-like materials are required in many robotic systems to improve human-machine interactions. However, the mechanical properties of living tissues are difficult to replicate. Synthetic materials are not usually capable of simultaneously…
Substrate engineering for steering cell growth is a wide and well-established area of research in the field of modern biotechnology. Here we introduce a micromachining technique to pattern an inert, transparent polymer matrix blended with a…
Tissue engineering aims to grow artificial tissues \emph{in vitro} to replace those in the body that have been damaged through age, trauma or disease. A recent approach to engineer artificial cartilage involves seeding cells within a…
Soft biological tissues exhibit a remarkable resilience to large mechanical loads, a property which is associated with the strain stiffening capability of the biopolymer networks that structurally support the tissues. Yet, recent studies…
Entangled networks of stiff biopolymers exhibit complex dynamic response, emerging from the topological constraints that neighboring filaments impose upon each other. We propose a class of reference models for entanglement dynamics of stiff…
Living tissues show an extraordinary adaptiveness to strain, which is crucial for their proper biological functioning. The physical origin of this mechanical behaviour has been widely investigated using reconstituted networks of collagen…
Matrix stiffness expressions are derived for the particle movements in an assembly of rigid granules having compliant contacts. The derivations include stiffness terms that arise from the particle shapes at their contacts. These geometric…
Soft composite solids, comprising discrete inclusions embedded within a compliant matrix, are emerging candidates for engineering synthetic tissues and soft robotic materials. Current strategies for controlling their nonlinear mechanics,…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and food grains are ubiquitous in civil engineering, geoscience, agriculture, and medicine. While the influence of friction between the grains on the static structure of these systems is well…
Hydrogels are widespread soft materials, which can serve a wide range of applications. The control over the viscoelastic properties of the gel is of paramount importance. Ongoing environmental issues have raised the consumer's concern…
Fibre-reinforced hydrogels are promising materials for biomedical applications due to their strength, toughness, and tunability. However, it remains unclear how to design fibre-reinforced hydrogels for use in specific applications due to…
A 3D unit cell model containing eight different spherical particles embedded in a homogeneous strain gradient plasticity (SGP) matrix material is presented. The interaction between particles and matrix is controlled by an interface model…
Polymer syntactic foams are transforming materials that will shape the future of next-generation aerospace and marine structures. When manufactured using traditional processes, like compression molding, syntactic foams consist of a solid…
Packings of macroscopic granular chains capture some of the essential aspects of molecular polymer systems and have been suggested as a paradigm to understand the physics on a molecular scale. However, here we demonstrate that the…
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…
We design, fabricate and test heterogeneous architected polycrystals, composed of hard plastomers and soft elastomers, which thus show outstanding mechanical resilience and energy dissipation simultaneously. Grain boundaries that separate…
Achieving damage tolerance in composite materials remains a central challenge in materials science. Conventional strategies often rely on filler incorporation or chemical modification, which can limit energy dissipation and constrain…
Soft yet tough materials are ubiquitous in nature and everyday life. The ratio between fracture toughness and intrinsic fracture energy of a soft material defines its toughness enhancement. Soft materials' toughness enhancement has been…
Soft composite solids are made of inclusions dispersed within soft matrices. They are ubiquitous in nature and form the basis of many biological tissues. In the field of materials science, synthetic soft composites are promising candidates…
We present a density-functional study of a binary phase-separating mixture of soft core particles immersed in a random matrix of quenched soft core particles of larger size. This is a model for a binary polymer mixture immersed in a…