Search

Wrinkling, creasing and folding are frequent phenomena encountered in biological and man-made bilayers made by thin films bonded to thicker and softer substrates often containing fibers. Paradigmatic examples of the latter are the skin, the brain, and arterial walls, for which wiggly cross-sections are detected. Although experimental investigations on corrugation of these and analog bilayers would greatly benefit from scaling laws for prompt comparison of the wrinkling features, neither are they available nor have systematic approaches yielding to such laws ever been provided before. This gap is filled in this paper, where a uniaxially compressed bilayer formed by a thin elastic film bonded on a hyperelastic fiber-reinforced substrate is considered. The force balance at the film-substrate interface is here analytically and numerically investigated for highly mismatched film-substrates. The onset of wrinkling is then characterized in terms of both the critical strain and its corresponding wavenumber. Inspired by the asymptotic laws available for neo-Hookean bilayers, the paper then provides a systematic way to achieve novel scaling laws for the wrinkling features for fiber-reinforced highly mismatched hyperelastic bilayers. Such novel scaling laws shed light on the key contributions defining the response of the bilayer, as it is characterized by a fiber-induced complex anisotropy. Results are compared with Finite Element Analyses and also with outcomes of both existing linear models and available adhoc scalings. Furthermore, the amplitude, the global maximum and minimum of ruga occurring under increasing compression spanning the wrinkling, period doubling and folding regimes are also obtained.

Langmuir monolayers are advantageous systems used to investigate how lipid membranes get involved in the physiology of many living structures, such as collapse phenomena in alveolar structures. Much work focuses on characterizing the pressure-bearing capacity of Langmuir films, expressed in the form of isotherm curves. These show that monolayers experience different phases during compression with an according evolution of their mechanical response, incurring into instability events when a critical stress threshold is overcome. Although well-known state equations, which establish an inverse relationship between surface pressure and area change, are able to describe monolayer behavior during liquid expanded phase, the modelling of their nonlinear behavior in the subsequent condensed region is still an open issue. In this regard, efforts are addressed to explain out-of-plane collapse by modeling buckling and wrinkling mainly resorting to linearly elastic plate theory. However, some experiments on Langmuir monolayers also show in-plane instability phenomena leading to the formation of the so-called shear bands and, to date, no theoretical description of the onset of shear banding bifurcation in monolayers has been yet provided. For this reason, by adopting a macroscopic description, we here study material stability of the monolayers and exploit an incremental approach to find the conditions that kindle shear bands. By starting from the widely assumed hypothesis that monolayers behave elastically in the solid-like region, a hyperfoam hyperelastic potential is introduced as a new constitutive strategy to trace back the nonlinear response of monolayer response during densification. In this way, the obtained mechanical properties together with the adopted strain energy are successfully employed to reproduce the onset of shear banding exhibited by some lipid systems under different conditions.

Bone is a stiff and though, hierarchical and continuously evolving material that optimizes its structure to respond to mechanical stimuli, which also govern growth and remodeling processes. However, a full understanding of the underlying mechanisms responsible for the cooperation of bone toughness and biological functions, with important implications in bone ageing, osteoporosis and tissue repair, has yet to be achieved. In particular, how micro-damage nucleation, needed for tissue remodeling, does not evolve into catastrophic failure in such a stiff material, still remains a partial enigma, cement lines, interfaces and sacrificial elements alone not providing a definitive answer to the question. Here, we bring to light a novel stress-based bone toughening mechanism, calling into play the nearly-symmetrical, chiral and hierarchical architecture of the osteons, demonstrating that their arrangement simultaneously gives rise to stress states alternating in sign along the osteon radius and to localized stress amplifications, both in the tensile and compressive regimes. This unveils a previously unforeseen synergistic mechanism allowing micro-damage accumulation without propagating cracks, kindled by the contrast between crack-opening due to tensile hoop stresses and crack-stopping due to compressive stresses at the crack tips in adjacent lamellae, which seal the crack ends conferring toughness to bone well beyond that predicted by current models. Furthermore, shear stresses occur at the lamellar interfaces, contributing with fluid flow to mechanically stimulate the osteocytes and to amplify the bone signalling. These results, obtained through original exact elastic solutions and confirmed by both FE fracture analyses and experimental tests on 3D-printed osteon prototypes, contribute with another piece in the puzzle to making the rational biophysical picture of bone mechanobiology complete.

Materials that are lightweight yet exhibit superior mechanical properties are of compelling importance for several technological applications that range from aircrafts to household appliances. Lightweight materials allow energy saving and reduce the amount of resources required for manufacturing. Researchers have expended significant efforts in the quest for such materials, which require new concepts in both tailoring material microstructure as well as structural design. Architectured materials, which take advantage of new engineering paradigms, have recently emerged as an exciting avenue to create bespoke combinations of desired macroscopic material responses. In some instances, rather unique structures have emerged from advanced geometrical concepts (e.g. gyroids, menger cubes, or origami/kirigami-based structures), while in others innovation has emerged from mimicking nature in bio-inspired materials (e.g. honeycomb structures, nacre, fish scales etc.). Beyond design, additive manufacturing has enabled the facile fabrication of complex geometrical and bio-inspired architectures, using computer aided design models. The combination of simulations and experiments on these structures has led to an enhancement of mechanical properties, including strength, stiffness and toughness. In this review, we provide a perspective on topologically engineered architectured materials that exhibit optimal mechanical behaviour and can be readily printed using additive manufacturing.

The mechanical performance of reinforced composites is strongly influenced at different scales by the stress transferred at the matrix-fibre interfaces and at any surface where material discontinuity occurs. In particular, the mechanical response of elastomeric composites where the reinforcement is composed by cords with helically wound fibres is heavily compromised by fatigue and delamination phenomena occurring at cord-rubber as well as at the ply interfaces, since rubber and polymeric matrices are mainly vulnerable to the accumulation of deviatoric energy due to the shear stresses transferred across the surfaces. Despite the large diffusion of composites in a vast field of applications and the mature knowledge of their behaviour, some key mechanical aspects underlying failure mechanisms are still partially unclear. For example, stress amplification and strain localization are often difficult to predict by means of analytical solutions and averaging techniques that usually conceal stress gradients. In this work, we analyse coupling between torsional and tensile loads in twisted cords, which are adopted in many cases to reinforce composites and rubbers in tire applications. We provide a model characterized by an enriched cord-matrix mechanical interplay able to theoretically explain and predict actual stress distributions responsible for the onset of delamination and fatigue-guided phenomena that are experimentally observed in these composites. In particular, we demonstrate that the assumption of a monoclinic/trigonal behaviour for the mechanical response of the hierarchical strands allows to estimate, by means of analytical formulas and a homogenization approach, hitherto neglected shear stresses at the matrix-reinforcement interface. These stresses are transferred to the neighbouring regions, leading to post-elastic behaviour and failure events.

Clustering of ligand-binding receptors of different types on thickened isles of the cell membrane, namely lipid rafts, is an experimentally observed phenomenon. Although its influence on cell response is deeply investigated, the role of the coupling between mechanical processes and multiphysics involving the active receptors and the surrounding lipid membrane during ligand-binding has not yet been understood. Specifically, the focus of this work is on G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), which regulate specific cell processes through chemical signalling pathways involving a synergistic balance between the cyclic Adenosine Monophosphate (cAMP) produced by active GPCRs in the intracellular environment and its efflux, mediated by Multidrug Resistance Proteins (MRPs) transporters. This paper develops a multiphysics approach based on the interplay among energetics, multiscale geometrical changes and mass balance of species, i.e. active GPCRs and MRPs, including diffusion and kinetics of binding and unbinding. Because the obtained energy depends upon both the kinematics and the changes of species densities, balance of mass and of linear momentum are coupled and govern the space-time evolution of the cell membrane. The mechanobiology involving remodelling and change of lipid ordering of the cell membrane allows to predict dynamics of transporters and active receptors -in agreement with experimentally observed cAMP levels- and how the latter trigger rafts formation and cluster on such sites. Within the current scientific debate on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and on the basis of the ascertained fact that lipid rafts often serve as an entry port for viruses, it is felt that approaches accounting for strong coupling among mechanobiological aspects could even turn helpful in better understanding membrane-mediated phenomena such as COVID-19 virus-cell interaction.

In the present work, the overall nonlinear elastic behavior of a 1D multi-modular structure incorporating possible imperfections at the discrete (micro-scale) level, is derived with respect to both tensile and compressive applied loads. The model is built up through the repetition of n units, each one comprising two rigid rods having equal lengths, linked by means of pointwise constraints capable to elastically limit motions in terms of relative translations (sliders) and rotations (hinges). The mechanical response of the structure is analyzed by varying the number n of the elemental moduli, as well as in the limit case of infinite number of infinitesimal constituents, in light of the theory of (first order) Structured Deformations (SDs), that interprets the deformation of any continuum body as the projection, at the macroscopic scale, of geometrical changes occurring at the level of its sub-macroscopic elements. In this way, a wide family of nonlinear elastic behaviors is generated by tuning internal microstructural parameters, the tensile buckling and the classical Euler Elastica under compressive loads resulting as special cases in the so-called continuum limit, say when n tends to 1. Finally, by plotting the results in terms of first Piola-Kirchhoff stress versus macroscopic stretch, it is for the first time demonstrated that such SDs-based 1D models can be helpfully used to generalize some standard hyperelastic behaviors by additionally taking into account instability phenomena and concealed defects.