Mechanics of entangled materials

David Rodney (teams MMCI and Soprano) has published with colleagues from the 3SR laboratory of the University Grenoble Alpes an article entitled "Reversible dilatancy in entangled single-wire materials " in the journal Nature Materials.

The mechanics of entangled materials is still far from being fully understood and has still surprises in store. D. Rodney and collaborators studied the behavior of structures made of a single wire entangled with itself. They showed that this structure, which shares a lot of similarities with open foams, has the great advantage of being highly deformable, being able to withstand up to at least 30% of reversible compression. D. Rodney and collaborators also studied the volume variations under deformation and found out that surprisingly, the structure expands both in compression and traction, showing original behaviors of reversible dilatancy in compression and auxeticity in traction. This architected material opens the way to many original applications, for instance as a strain-actuated filter.

22/10/2015