Publications related to Nacre-inspired Hard and Tough Materials

Additive Manufacturing of Bioinspired Mineral-Based Composites

Biominerals are used by natural organisms for example as structural supports and optical sensors. They are produced from a limited number of elements and under ambient conditions. Nevertheless, they often possess excellent mechanical properties and sometim ...

EPFL2024

Computational Homogenization for Inverse Design of Surface-based Inflatables

Mark Pauly, Francis Julian Panetta, Uday Kusupati, Yingying Ren, Florin Isvoranu, Seiichi Eduardo Suzuki Erazo

Surface-based inflatables are composed of two thin layers of nearly inextensible sheet material joined together along carefully selected fusing curves. During inflation, pressure forces separate the two sheets to maximize the enclosed volume. The fusing c ...

2024

Customized modular multi-material mouthguard and method of making the same

Dominique Pioletti, Martin Broome, Naser Nasrollahzadeh Mamaghani

There is described a mouthguard comprising an externally exposed impact protective region defined by a first material property and configured to cover a front tooth, an internally exposed occlusional cushioning region defined by a second material property ...

2024

Modeling friction and wear using an adaptive discrete-continuum coupling

Manon Eugénie Voisin--Leprince

When two objects slide against each other, wear and friction occur at their interface. The accumulation of wear forms what is commonly referred to as a ``third-body''. Understanding third-body evolution has significant applications in industry, where contr ...

EPFL2024

Insights from an extensive triaxial testing campaign on a shale for comparative site characterization of a deep geological repository

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Eleonora Crisci

Several boreholes were drilled for site comparison of a deep geological repository (DGR) in Northern Switzerland. The main target of the exploration program was the >100m thick Opalinus Clay, the designated host rock encountered at approximately 450 to 100 ...

Elsevier2024

Morphological and Material Programability of a Hall-Effect Based Soft Tactile Sensors

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Sudong Lee

The different receptors in human skin show not only diversity in the stimuli to which they respond, but also variable sensitivity and directionality. This is often determined by their location or morphology, and can play an important role in filtering or a ...

IEEE2024

Label-Free Techniques for Probing Biomolecular Condensates

Aleksandra Radenovic, Khalid Ashraf Mohie Ibrahim, Helena Miljkovic, Wayne Yang Wen Wei, Akhil Sai Naidu

Biomolecular condensates play important roles in a wide array of fundamental biological processes, such as cellular compartmentalization, cellular regulation, and other biochemical reactions. Since their discovery and first observations, an extensive and e ...

Amer Chemical Soc2024

Influence of model uncertainty and long term deformations in action effects calculation in reinforced concrete structures

Xhemsi Malja

Most codes of practice adopt a semi probabilistic design approach for the dimensioning and assessment of structures. Accordingly, structural safety is ensured by performing limit state verifications using design values determined with adequately calibrated ...

EPFL2024

Improving the photoelectrocatalytic efficiency of CuWO4 through molybdenum for tungsten substitution and coupling with BiVO4

Kevin Sivula, Annalisa Polo

A systematic investigation on the photoelectrocatalytic (PEC) performance of a series of CuW1-xMoxO4 materials with different Mo for W substitution (x = 0-0.8), successfully synthesized as single, transparent photoactive layers, allowed us to identify copp ...

Royal Soc Chemistry2024

Imaging Radial Distribution Functions of Complex Particles by Relayed Dynamic Nuclear Polarization

Arthur César Pinon, David Lyndon Emsley, Pierrick Berruyer

The physical properties of many modern multi-component materials are determined by their internal microstructure. Tools capable of characterizing complex nanoscale architectures in composite materials are, therefore, essential to design materials with targ ...

2023

Experimental testing and structural analysis of composite tile – reinforced concrete domes

Savvas Saloustros

Conventional formworks for concrete curved shells either are expensive, complex and wasteful or have formal restrictions. Using tile vaults (also known as timbrel, Guastavino, thin-tile or Catalan vaults) as stay-in-place formwork for concrete shells could ...

2023

A universal route to efficient non-linear response via Thomson scattering in linear solids

Cheng Wang, Gabriel Aeppli, Joe Martin Bailey, Junjie Li, Min Chen, Ji Zhou

Non-linear materials are cornerstones of modern optics and electronics. Strong dependence on the intrinsic properties of particular materials, however, inhibits the at-will extension of demanding non-linear effects, especially those second-order ones, to w ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2023

Controlling the Microstructure and Composition of 3D Printed Soft Load-Bearing Hydrogels

Matteo Hirsch

Hydrogels are among the first materials expressly designed for their use in biomedicine. However, state-of-the-art applications of hydrogels are severely limited because they are typically either too soft or too brittle such that they cannot bear significa ...

EPFL2023

Investigation of Biomass Hydrothermal Conversion Products by HRMS

Daniil Salionov

The dependency on fossil fuels and their impact on the environment is a matter of great concern for the future sustainability of modern society. The development of the "green" technologies which utilize renewable energy sources is now under investigation. ...

EPFL2023

Atomic-scale Characterization of Strain and Gate effects on Two-dimensional Materials by Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

Jz -Yuan Juo

Strain is an inevitable phenomenon in two-dimensional (2D) material, regardless of whether the film is suspended or supported. Moreover, strain is known to alter the physical and chemical properties, such as the band gap, charge carrier effective masses, d ...

EPFL2023

Modeling the mechanics and rheology of porous and granular media: an elastoplastic continuum approach

Lars Kristoffer Uhlen Blatny

The complex mechanics of porous and granular media play a significant role in various industrial processes and natural phenomena. As an example, understanding the mechanics of how failure occurs, localizes and propagates in porous brittle solids under vari ...

EPFL2023

Experiments and proposed model for residual stresses in hot-rolled wide flange shapes

Albano António De Abreu E Presa De Castro E Sousa, Dimitrios Lignos, Andronikos Skiadopoulos

This paper proposes a new residual stress model for hot-rolled wide flange steel cross sections. For this purpose, a dataset of 85 residual stress measurements is first assembled. The dataset is comprised of prior measurements available in the literature t ...

2023

Tailoring Organic/Inorganic Interface Trap States of Metal Oxide/Polyimide toward Improved Vacuum Surface Insulation

Chao Wang, Guang-Yu Sun, Haoxiang Zhao

High-voltage and high-power devices are indispensablein spacecraftfor outer space explorations, whose operations require aerospace materialswith adequate vacuum surface insulation performance. Despite persistentattempts to fabricate such materials, current ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

van der Waals Materials for Overcoming Fundamental Limitations in Photonic Integrated Circuitry

Arslan Mazitov

With the advance of on-chip nanophotonics, there is a high demand for high-refractive-index and low-loss materials. Currently, this technology is dominated by silicon, but van der Waals (vdW) materials with a high refractive index can offer a very advanced ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Digital manufacturing of personalised footwear with embedded sensors

Danick Briand, Rubaiyet Iftekharul Haque, Ryan Mitchell van Dommelen, Jaemin Kim

The strong clinical demand for more accurate and personalized health monitoring technologies has called for the development of additively manufactured wearable devices. While the materials palette for additive manufacturing continues to expand, the integra ...

Nature Research2023