Effects of Intrinsic Properties on Fracture Nucleation and Propagation in Swelling Hydrogels.

In numerous industrial applications, the microstructure of materials is critical for performance. However, finite element models tend to average out the microstructure. Hence, finite element simulations are often unsuitable for optimisation of the microstructure.

Integration efficiency for model reduction in micro-mechanical analyses.

Micro-structural analyses are an important tool to understand material behavior on a macroscopic scale. The analysis of a microstructure is usually computationally very demanding and there are several reduced order modeling techniques available in literature to limit the computational costs of repetitive analyses of a single representative volume element. These techniques to speed up the integration at the micro-scale can be roughly divided into two classes; methods interpolating the integrand and cubature methods.

Model for the scaling of stresses and fluctuations in flows near jamming.

We probe flows of soft, viscous spheres near the jamming point, which acts as a critical point for static soft spheres. Starting from energy considerations, we find nontrivial scaling of velocity fluctuations with strain rate. Combining this scaling with insights from jamming, we arrive at an analytical model that predicts four distinct regimes of flow, each characterized by rational-valued scaling exponents.