While the surface asperities of mineral platelets are widely believed to play important roles in stiffening, strengthening, and toughening nacre, their effects have not been thoroughly investigated. Here, a computationally efficient bar-spring model is adopted to simulate, as platelets with multiple interfacial asperities slide over each other, the tensile force versus elongation behaviors as well as the effective mechanical properties such as modulus, strength, and work-to-fracture in nacre or nacre-like composites.

Fast stress wave attenuation in composites is highly desired in many industry fields. Biological composites such as those in the beak of woodpeckers provide great inspiration for us to develop their synthetic counterparts with similar mechanical functions.

Interface plays a critical role in the mechanical performance of composites. Lack of a suitable interface design has long been a bottleneck impeding the full exploitation of the mechanical strengths of many superior reinforcement phases such as the high-performance carbon fibers and carbon nanotubes.

Nacre is well known for its high strength and toughness owing to its ingenious “brick-and-mortar” microstructure. However, its impact resistance has not been studied as well as its static properties, even though protecting fragile organs from external dynamic loadings is one of its most important functions.

Osteoporosis (OP), a skeletal disease making bone mechanically deteriorate and easily fracture, is a global public health issue due to its high prevalence. It has been well recognized that besides bone loss, microarchitecture degradation plays a crucial role in the mechanical deterioration of OP bones, but the specific role of microarchitecture in OP has not been well clarified and quantified from mechanics perspective.

Based on the theory of composite mechanics, a three-pillar framework “bone mass-microarchitecture-tissue property” instead of “bone mass-bone quality”, is proposed to quantitively characterize the mechanical deterioration of osteoporotic cancellous bones related to the three aspects, and accordingly the individual and integrative influences of bone mass, microarchitecture and tissue property on the mechanical properties of cancellous bones are investigated via the μCT-based finite element method (

Abstract: Calendering is a crucial step in lithium-ion battery (LIB) electrode manufacturing, as it strongly influences electrode microstructure, mechanical integrity, and electrochemical behavior. This study introduces an innovative induction heating-assisted calendering (IHAC) technique that enables non-contact, directional heating of the current collector, allowing precise thermal control and microstructural tailoring during compaction.

In this paper, we formulate a geometric theory of the mechanics of arterial growth. An artery is modeled as a finite-length thick shell that is made of an incompressible nonlinear anisotropic solid. An initial radially-symmetric distribution of finite radial and circumferential eigenstrains is also considered. Bulk growth is assumed to be isotropic. A novel framework is proposed to describe the time evolution of growth, governed by a competition between the elastic energy and a growth energy.

NOSA-ITACA is a finite element software designed to study the static and dynamic behavior of masonry buildings with historical and architectural significance, as well as to model the effectiveness of strengthening interventions. 

You can use NOSA-ITACA by downloading the pre-configured virtual machine at www.nosaitaca.it/software/ and importing it into Oracle VirtualBox.