The performance properties of many polymers are dom inated by the molecular alignment induced during pro cessing by the elongational ow component that is the diagonal component of the velocity gradient tensor Here we discuss two idealizations of this ow microstructure in teraction We rst summarize our recent studies of biaxial nematic patterns and phase transitions Forest andWang a of lyotropic...

The role for mechanical stimulation in the control of cell fate has been previously proposed, suggesting that there may be a role of mechanical conditioning in directing mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) towards specific lineage for tissue engineering applications. Although previous studies have reported that calcium signalling is involved in regulating many cellular processes in many cell types...

The force-extension behavior of single modular biomacromolecules is known to exhibit a characteristic repeating pattern of a nonlinear rise in force with imposed displacement to a peak, followed by a significant force drop upon reaching the peak. This “saw-tooth” pattern is a result of stretch-induced unfolding of modules along the molecular chain and is speculated to play a governing role in t...

Crystallographic texture evolution was quantified as a function of biaxial strain level and strain path for AA5754-O sheet metal in an effort to provide a physical description of grain rotation resulting from in-plane stretching. Samples were incrementally deformed to near-failure in three strain states (equibiaxial, plane strain, and uniaxial modes) with the rolling direction (RD) and transver...

The effect of intrinsic ripples on the mechanical response of the graphene monolayer is investigated under uniaxial loading using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with a focus on nonlinear behavior at a small strain. The calculated stress-strain response shows a nonlinear relation through the entire range without constant slopes as a result of the competition between ripple softening and bon...

We present rotating periodic boundary conditions (PBCs) for the simulation of nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) under uniaxial stretching flow (USF) or biaxial (BSF). Such flows need specialized PBCs since box deforms with background flow. The technique builds on previous models using one two lattice remappings, and is simpler than developed general three dimensional For flows, Dobson [1...