410 Mechanics of Soft Materials with Multi-physics: From Deformation to Failure

 

The continuing revolution in the development of soft materials is transforming the engineering of devices. In many applications, harnessing the potential of soft materials hinges on whether mechanical behaviors, including but not limited to deformation and failure, can be understood, prevented or controlled. In contrast to hard materials, in soft devices the length scale of fracture-type processes is often comparable to the structural dimensions, and thus fracture cannot be decoupled from the rest of the response. Additionally, the presence of competing complex responses, e.g., the Mullins effect, viscous flow, solvent diffusion and reaction, multiscale instabilities, formation and breaking of temporary bonds complicate the picture, but also provide opportunities to tailor performance of materials in new ways. Analyzing these phenomena requires the development of new modeling and computational approaches and techniques.

Specifically, for computational aspect, such as multi-physics fields coupling, phase field modeling, XFEM approach, faster methods for solving discretized equations, adaptation of the numerical codes to parallel computation, are in need. These developments play a central role in advancing the understanding of mechanical and physical behavior of soft materials. Therefore, a Mini-Symposium on mechanic of soft materials is a timely concern. The aim is to provide an exposition of the current state of the art and a survey about recent developments and to create perspectives for future research trends.