Publications by authors named "C L Soles"
Understanding the physical and chemical response of materials to impulsive deformation is crucial for applications ranging from soft robotic locomotion to space exploration to seismology. However, investigating material properties at extreme strain rates remains challenging due to temporal and spatial resolution limitations. Combining high-strain-rate testing with mechanochemistry encodes the molecular-level deformation within the material itself, thus enabling the direct quantification of the material response.
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- * Adding 15 mol % of a difunctional chain extender reduces the cross-link density by half, increasing the free amine content by 80%, which leads to greater swelling and a 30% increase in salt passage but surprisingly a 30% decrease in water permeance.
- * The observed decrease in water permeance is explained by slower water diffusion in the less cross-linked network, indicating stronger interactions between water and the increased free amine groups, demonstrating complex behavior in water mobility at different scales.
From drug delivery to ballistic impact, the ability to control or mitigate the puncture of a fast-moving projectile through a material is critical. While puncture is a common occurrence, which can span many orders of magnitude in the size, speed, and energy of the projectile, there remains a need to connect our understanding of the perforation resistance of materials at the nano- and microscale to the actual behavior at the macroscale that is relevant for engineering applications. In this article, we address this challenge by combining a new dimensional analysis scheme with experimental data from micro- and macroscale impact tests to develop a relationship that connects the size-scale effects and materials properties during high-speed puncture events.
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- Cavitation occurs when internal pressure in a material exceeds the surrounding medium’s resistance, allowing for unique measurements of soft materials' mechanical properties through various methods.
- The new technique, called laser-induced membrane expansion (LIME), uses laser ablation to rapidly expand a thin elastomeric membrane and measure its shear modulus at high strain rates.
- LIME was applied to poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) membranes with different thicknesses and crosslink densities, revealing that while the shear modulus was minimally affected by crosslink density, it significantly changed with strain rates, ranging from 10 Pa to 10 Pa.
Modern design of common adhesives, composites and polymeric parts makes use of polymer glasses that are stiff enough to maintain their shape under a high stress while still having a ductile behavior after the yield point. Typically, material compositions are tuned with co-monomers, polymer blends, plasticizers, or other additives to arrive at a tradeoff between the elastic modulus and toughness. In contrast, strong changes to the mechanics of a glass are possible by changing only the molecular packing during vitrification or even deep in the glassy state.
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