Stress Singularities in Swelling Soft Solids

Stress Singularities in Swelling Soft Solids.

When a swelling soft solid is rigidly constrained on all sides except for a circular opening, it will bulge out to expand as observed during decompressive craniectomy, a surgical procedure used to reduce stresses in swollen brains. While the elastic energy of the solid decreases throughout this process, large stresses develop close to the opening. At the point of contact, the stresses exhibit a...

Soft tissue swelling in an Arabian gelding.

Lubrication of soft viscoelastic solids

Lubrication flows appear in many applications in engineering, biophysics, and in nature. Separation of surfaces and minimisation of friction and wear is achieved when the lubrication fluid builds up a lift force. In this paper we analyse soft lubricated contacts by treating the solid walls as viscoelastic: soft materials are typically not purely elastic, but dissipate energy under dynamical loa...

Surface sulci in squeezed soft solids.

The squeezing of soft solids, the constrained growth of biological tissues, and the swelling of soft elastic solids such as gels can generate large compressive stresses at their surfaces. This causes the otherwise smooth surface of such a solid to become unstable when its stress exceeds a critical value. Previous analyses of the surface instability have assumed two-dimensional plane-strain cond...

Shear waves and shocks in soft solids.

We study the motion of a sphere falling through soft viscoelastic materials when the time scale of the motion is short compared to the elastic relaxation time of the material. We observe shocks generated by the passage of the sphere at Mach numbers greater than 1. The sphere can undergo oscillations before reaching a steady terminal speed, and we show that these oscillations have the same frequ...