Recent progress on studies of the nanoscale mechanical responses in disordered systems has highlighted a strong degree of heterogeneity in the elastic moduli. In this contribution, using computer simulations, we study the elastic heterogeneities in athermal amorphous solids--composed of isotropic static sphere packings--near the jamming transition. We employ techniques based on linear response ...

Actuating periodically an elastic filament in a viscous liquid generally breaks the constraints of Purcell's scallop theorem, resulting in the generation of a net propulsive force. This observation suggests a method to design simple swimming devices-which we call "elastic swimmers"-where the actuation mechanism is embedded in a solid body and the resulting swimmer is free to move. In this paper...

The hydrophobic-amphiphilic self-assembly approach has been employed to prepare molecular micro-capsules simply by cooling down an emulsion, in a hot polar solvent medium, of a melted compound having two very well-distinguished units, both with highly non-polar and hydrophobic characteristics. The resulting micro-capsules are very stable and robust both in suspension and under dry conditions. F...

2014 The elastic constants, magnetic susceptibility, refractive index and density are reported for p,p’-diheptylazobenzene. The behaviour of the elastic constants of this non polar compound is very similar to that of related polar compounds. The anisotropy of both the static and the highfrequency permittivity is proportional to the anisotropy of the susceptibility, as observed earlier for the h...

We demonstrate that the phase transition from columnar-hexagonal liquid crystal to hexagonal-crystalline solid falls into an unusual universality class, which in three dimensions allows for both discontinuous transitions as well as continuous transitions, characterized by a single set of exponents. We show by a renormalization group calculation (to first order in =4-d) that the critical exponen...

Considered is the interaction of macro-and micro-cracks in an anisotropic piezoelectric solid. The GreenÕs function and principle of superposition are used to formulate a system of singular integral equations for solving the unknown temperature discontinuity and elastic displacement-electric potential. The residual heat ̄ux, stress and electric displacement on the microcrack are evaluated direc...

Micro Abstract We present a new and completely parallel approach for fluid-structure interaction, which includes also contact between the elastic structures. Our approach is inspired by the fictitious domain method and makes intensive use of variational transfer between the solid and the fluid and on the possibly contacting surfaces between solids. We present the discretization, the setup of th...

Material forces govern the behaviour and the evolution of a defect or of an inhomogeneity in a solid material. In elastic materials these forces are associated with the Eshelby tensor, as is known. In structured or micro-structured materials, an Eshelby–like stress can be assembled by following a simple rule. By appealing to this rule, one is able to propose an expression for the Eshelby tensor...