core-shell

Many biological structures exhibit intriguing morphological patterns adapted to environmental cues, which contribute to their important biological functions and also inspire material designs. Here, we report a chiral wrinkling topography in shrinking core–shell spheres, as observed in excessively dehydrated passion fruit and experimentally demonstrated in silicon core–shells under air extraction. Upon shrinkage deformation, the surface initially buckles into a buckyball pattern (periodic hexagons and pentagons) and then transforms into a chiral mode.

Curvature-induced symmetry-breaking pattern formation and transition are widely observed in curved film/substrate systems across different length scales such as embryogenesis, heterogeneous micro-particles, dehydrated fruits, growing tumors and planetary surfaces.

There has been a strong and recent research activity to obtain tunable wrinkling patterns in film/substrate systems, which proposes to use geometric curvature as a control parameter. This paper studies core-shell cylindrical systems under thermal loads, with the aim to describe possible wrinkling modes, bifurcation diagrams and dimensionless parameters influencing the response of the system.

Recent interests in curvature- and stress-induced pattern formation and pattern selection motivate the present study. Surface morphological wrinkling of a cylindrical shell supported by a soft core subjected to axial compression is investigated based on a nonlinear 3D finite element model. The post-buckling behavior of core-shell cylinders beyond the first bifurcation often leads to complicated responses with surface mode transitions. The proposed finite element framework allows predicting and tracing these bifurcation portraits from a quantitative standpoint.

A polymer network can imbibe water from environment and swell to an equilibrium state. If the equilibrium is reached when the network is subject to external mechanical constraint, the deformation of the network is typically anisotropic, and the concentration of water inhomogeneous.  Such an equilibrium state in a network constrained by a hard core is modeled here with a nonlinear differential equation.  The presence of the hard core markedly reduces the concentration of water near the interface and causes high stresses.