Mechanically instructive biomaterials: a synergy of mechanics, materials and biology
Zhenwei Ma, Jianyu Li
Department of Mechanical Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Elastomers are among the most familiar and most deceptive solids. They stretch enormously, recover their shape, and appear forgiving in a way that glass or ceramic never would. Yet they are held together by covalent bonds whose intrinsic strength is measured in GPa. The macroscopic strength of rubber-like networks, however, is usually only in the MPa range. How does a material made of very strong bonds become so weak?
Dear colleagues,
I am honoured to be helping restart the EML Webinar Series as Special Editor for Extreme Mechanics Letters (EML).
Our first seminar of the new season will be by Prof. Alain Goriely, University of Oxford, on:
“Tilings and Mosaics: Soft Cells and the Tainted Love of the Nautilus”
Date: Friday, 19 June 2026
Time: 10 am Boston / 10 pm Beijing / 4 pm Paris / 3 pm London
Discussion leader: Prof. Ellen Kuhl, Stanford University
Jiang Ke. Orthotropic metamaterials with freely tailorable elastic constants. AIP Advances, 2023, 13 (9): 095205.
Can a transverse load with zero resultant buckle an elastic rod like an axial load? Theory, simulations, and experiments show that it can, producing Euler-type instability and postbuckling even in the vanishing-thickness limit.
Watch the video here.
Maybe you are interested in the JMPS paper here.
PET is everywhere: bottles, packaging, fibers, films.
When we pull it, it can neck. What appears to be damage or the end of useful deformation can instead become the beginning of a new material state.
A fully funded PhD position is available at the Department of Mechanics and Materials, Faculty of Transportation Sciences, Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU), Czech Republic, within the international PICTUS doctoral fellowship programme.
Material strength is a classical concept that has recently found renewed applications in fracture mechanics, especially in models for crack nucleation in brittle solids. In this paper, we formulate material strength in the setting of finite elasticity and examine its geometric, constitutive, and symmetry-theoretic foundations. We show that spatial covariance requires a strength function to depend on both stress and the corresponding strain measure, so that strength is not controlled by stress alone, but by the pair (stress,strain).
Our latest paper, “Atomistic modeling of strain rate and temperature dependent tensile response of amorphous PEEK” is now freely accessible for the next 50 days from this link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1m%7Eye_l8CMeRY
Dear colleagues, please join us for an upcoming ASME-Noise Control & Acoustics Division (NCAD) webinar (Noise Control & Acoustics Division - ASME) on Uncertainty Analysis of Electromechanical Properties in Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters
