The textured response of nematic elastomers and other strange solids

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Professor Mark Warner, Cavendish Laboratory
• Friday 27 January 2012, 14:00-15:00
• Oatley Seminar Room, Department of Engineering.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ms Helen Gardner.

Nematic solids change their order when heated or illuminated and thereby elongate or contract by between 4 – 400%. They make interesting responsive cantilevers and, if they possess topological defects in their nematic fields, flat sheets can develop into shells with Gaussian curvature without stretch energy. Elastomeric nematic solids retain mobility of their ordering direction. Some large shears and elongations are achieved without energy cost by rotation of this direction. With boundary constraints, microstructure development is required to achieve such optimal deformations. Surprisingly, large soft deformations of polydomains can be achieved via texture evolution. We place bounds on their deformation energies, even for finite strains.

This talk is part of the Engineering - Mechanics and Materials Seminar Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge University Engineering Department Talks
• Cambridge talks
• Centre for Smart Infrastructure & Construction
• Computational Continuum Mechanics Group Seminars
• Engineering - Mechanics and Materials Seminar Series
• Engineering - Mechanics, Materials and Design (Div C) - talks and events
• Featured lists
• Interested Talks
• Lennard-Jones Centre external
• Oatley Seminar Room, Department of Engineering
• School of Technology
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.