No Arabic abstract
Yielding transition in isotropic soft materials under superposition of orthogonal deformation fields is known to follow von Mises criterion. However, in anisotropic soft materials von Mises criterion fails owing to preferred directions associated with the system. In this work we study a model anisotropic yield stress system: electrorheological (ER) fluids that show structure formation in the direction of electric field. We subject the ER fluids to superposition of orthogonal stress fields that leads to different yield stress values. We obtain a yielding state diagram by plotting normalized rotational shear stress against normalized radial shear stress corresponding to yield point for a given electric field. Remarkably, the state diagram validates the Hill yielding criterion, which is a general yielding criterion for materials having anisotropy along three orthogonal directions, originally developed for metallic systems. Validation of Hill criterion suggests the universality of its application to anisotropic systems including conventional anisotropic soft materials having yield stress.
We report on experiments that probe the stability of a two-dimensional jammed granular system formed by imposing a quasistatic simple shear strain $gamma_{rm I}$ on an initially stress free packing. We subject the shear jammed system to quasistatic cyclic shear with strain amplitude $deltagamma$. We observe two distinct outcomes after thousands of shear cycles. For small $gamma_{rm I}$ or large $deltagamma$, the system reaches a stress-free, yielding state exhibiting diffusive strobed particle displacements with a diffusion coefficient proportional to $deltagamma$. For large $gamma_{rm I}$ and small $deltagamma$, the system evolves to a stable state in which both particle positions and contact forces are unchanged after each cycle and the response to small strain reversals is highly elastic. Compared to the original shear jammed state, a stable state reached after many cycles has a smaller stress anisotropy, a much higher shear stiffness, and less tendency to dilate when sheared. Remarkably, we find that stable states show a power-law relation between shear modulus and pressure with an exponent $betaapprox 0.5$, independent of $deltagamma$. Based on our measurements, we construct a phase diagram in the $(gamma_{rm I},deltagamma)$ plane showing where our shear-jammed granular materials either stabilize or yield in the long-time limit.
Layered materials have uncommonly anisotropic thermal properties due to their strong in-plane covalent bonds and weak out-of-plane van der Waals interactions. Here we examine heat flow in graphene (graphite), h-BN, MoS2, and WS2 monolayers and bulk films, from diffusive to ballistic limits. We determine the ballistic thermal conductance limit (Gball) both in-plane and out-of-plane, based on full phonon dispersions from first-principles calculations. An overall phonon mean free path ({lambda}) is expressed in terms of Gball and the diffusive thermal conductivity, consistent with kinetic theory if proper averaging of phonon group velocity is used. We obtain a size-dependent thermal conductivity k(L) in agreement with available experiments, and find that k(L) only converges to >90% of the diffusive thermal conductivity for sample sizes L > 16{lambda}, which ranges from ~140 nm for MoS2 cross-plane to ~10 um for suspended graphene in-plane. These results provide a deeper understanding of microscopic thermal transport, revealing that device scales below which thermal size effects should be taken into account are generally larger than previously thought.
Predicting when rupture occurs or cracks progress is a major challenge in numerous elds of industrial, societal and geophysical importance. It remains largely unsolved: Stress enhancement at cracks and defects, indeed, makes the macroscale dynamics extremely sensitive to the microscale material disorder. This results in giant statistical uctuations and non-trivial behaviors upon upscaling dicult to assess via the continuum approaches of engineering. These issues are examined here. We will see: How linear elastic fracture mechanics sidetracks the diculty by reducing the problem to that of the propagation of a single crack in an eective material free of defects, How slow cracks sometimes display jerky dynamics, with sudden violent events incompatible with the previous approach, and how some paradigms of statistical physics can explain it, How abnormally fast cracks sometimes emerge due to the formation of microcracks at very small scales.
It is demonstrated that the Lindemanns criterion of melting can be formulated for two-dimensional classical solids using statistical mechanics arguments. With this formulation the expressions for the melting temperature are equivalent in three and two dimensions. Moreover, in two dimensions the Lindemanns melting criterion essentially coincides with the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless-Halperin-Nelson-Young melting condition of dislocation unbinding.
We study the micromechanics of collagen-I gel with the goal of bridging the gap between theory and experiment in the study of biopolymer networks. Three-dimensional images of fluorescently labeled collagen are obtained by confocal microscopy and the network geometry is extracted using a 3d network skeletonization algorithm. Each fiber is modeled as a worm-like-chain that resists stretching and bending, and each cross-link is modeled as torsional spring. The stress-strain curves of networks at three different densities are compared to rheology measurements. The model shows good agreement with experiment, confirming that strain stiffening of collagen can be explained entirely by geometric realignment of the network, as opposed to entropic stiffening of individual fibers. The model also suggests that at small strains, cross-link deformation is the main contributer to network stiffness whereas at large strains, fiber stretching dominates. Since this modeling effort uses networks with realistic geometries, this analysis can ultimately serve as a tool for understanding how the mechanics of fibers and cross-links at the microscopic level produce the macroscopic properties of the network. While the focus of this paper is on the mechanics of collagen, we demonstrate a framework that can be applied to many biopolymer networks.