research

Dear Colleagues,

I am sharing a recent paper titled "Designing Physicochemically‐Ordered Interphases for High‐Performance Composites" published in Advanced Functional Materials. Here is the link to the paper:  https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202502972

I am happy to share our recent paper published in Cell Reports Physical Science: Inhomogeneous substrate strain-driven long-range cellular patterning

Smart soft materials have gained increasing attention in recent years because of their adaptive behaviors to external multi-physics stimuli, enabling diverse applications across multiple fields. Here, we show programmable wrinkling morphological patterns on liquid crystal network (LCN) bilayers bonded to compliant substrates under thermal load, by tuning the orientation of directors between LCN bilayers. We propose a solid-shell formulation that merges enhanced and natural assumed strain approaches to investigate the pattern formation and morphological transition of LCN bilayers.

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), as a unique class of smart soft materials combining the properties of liquid crystals and hyperelasticity, are capable of rapid, anisotropic, and reversible deformations in response to mechanical, thermal or optical stimuli. Here, we report a hitherto unknown stretching-induced twisting behavior of LCE bilayer strips. Under uniaxial stretching, we reveal that due to the spontaneous mismatch strain arising from interlayer anisotropy, the bilayer strips exhibit notable twisting deformations.

Our latest paper, " Exploring the Effects of Temperature, Transverse Pressure, and Strain Rate on Axial Tensile Behavior of Perfect UHMWPE Crystals Using Molecular Dynamics," is accessible freely for 50 days from this link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1kT-A4rCEkw1es

The key findings can be summarized as follows:

"Advanced numerical modelling and simulation of vesicle dynamics using phase-field and isogeometric analysis" - January 31, 2025, Friday, 3:00 pm, Pavilhão de Mecânica II, amphitheatre AM

Date: January 31, 2025, Friday
Time: 3:00 pm
Place: Pavilhão de Mecânica II, amphitheatre AM

two PhD positions in our team working on 1) multiscale modeling of brain biomechanics and 2) machine learning-accelerated virtual testing. 

Please forward the information to anybody you know who may be interested. Kindly note the application deadline is Jan 24.

Full description & contact: see attached document
University & laboratory: University of Lyon, Laboratoire de Tribologie et Dynamique des Systèmes (LTDS), Ecole Nationale des Travaux Publics de l'Etat (ENTPE), Géomatériaux et Constructions Durables (GCD).
Location: Lyon, France
Period: 4-year China Scholarship Council scholarship application (only chinese student application)

Link:    https://a

In this recent EML paper, we show the stark effect of curvature on the performance of metamaterials, both in the static and dynamic domains. Read more at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eml.2024.102285

I am happy to share our paper entitled 'Effect of notch root radius on apparent fracture toughness of Ti6Al4V alloy: experiments and simulations' recently published in International Journal of Fracture. 

Just published on JMPS

AbstractHigh-frequency micrometrical vibrations have been shown to greatly influence the adhesive performance of soft interfaces, however a detailed comparison between theoretical predictions and experimental results is still missing. Here, the problem of a rigid spherical indenter, hung on a soft spring, that is unloaded from an adhesive viscoelastic vibrating substrate is considered. The experimental tests were performed by unloading a borosilicate glass lens from a soft PDMS substrate excited by high-frequency micrometrical vibrations.

I am pleased to share our first open-access article of 2025! just published in #ActaMaterialia.

It turns out that friction coefficient 0.25 suggested as universal by Leonardo da Vinci more than 500 years ago has some universaility, as minimum friction coefficient for any granular material: it makes me proud as italian ;) I guess it would be interesting to show this experimental result also theoretically or numerically, any interest? [HTML] 

A scheme for treating the Second Law of thermodynamics as a constraint and accounting for the approximate nature of constitutive assumptions in continuum thermomechanics is discussed. An unconstrained, concave, variational principle is designed for solving the resulting mathematical problem. Cases when the Second Law becomes an over-constraint on the mechanical model, as well as when it serves as a necessary constraint, are discussed.

Hello:  I would be interested in any comment about this preprint on fibrillar viscoelastic adhesion, originally devised by Schargott Popov and Gorb, where we use for the first time not only the Schapery model for nucleation of cracks, but also the Shrimali and Lopez Pamies, which leads to quite stronger enhancement of adhesion (the limit is the square of the Schapery one), and pull-off with no real prior propagation phase.  Propagation with Schapery nucleation criterion is found to be qualitatively similar to the Schapery and Persson-Brener propagation theories, except that the reference ve