Elbow dimensions in quadrupedal mammals driven by lubrication regime.

Synovial joints, such as the elbow, experience different lubrication regimes, ranging from fluid film to boundary lubrication, depending on locomotion conditions. We explore the relationship between the elbow lubrication regime and the size of quadrupedal mammals. We use allometry to analyze the dimensions, contact stress, and sliding speed of the elbow in 110 quadrupedal mammals. Our results reveal that the average diameter and width of the distal humerus are scaled [Formula: see text], which allowed us to estimate a consistent contact pressure and sliding speed across mammals. This consistency likely promotes fluid film lubrication regardless of body mass. Further, the ratio between the diameter and width is about 0.5 for all analyzed taxa, which is a good compromise between loading capacity and size. Our study deepens our understanding of synovial joints and their adaptations, with implications for the development of treatments, prostheses, and bioinspired joint designs.

Impact of a pressurized membrane: Coefficient of restitution.

Pressurized membranes are usually used for low cost structures (e.g., inflatable beds), impact protections (e.g., airbags), or sport balls. The last two examples deal with impacts on the human body. Underinflated protective membranes are not effective whereas overinflated objects can cause injury at impact. The coefficient of restitution represents the ability of a membrane to dissipate energy during an impact. Its dependence on membrane properties and inflation pressure is investigated on a model experiment using a spherical membrane. The coefficient of restitution increases with inflation pressure but decreases with impact speed. For a spherical membrane, it is shown that kinetic energy is lost by transfer to vibration modes. A physical modeling of a spherical membrane impact is built considering a quasistatic impact with small indentation. Finally, the dependency of the coefficient of restitution with mechanical parameters, pressurization, and impact characteristics is given.

Damage resilience of manufactured and biological actuators.

Designing resilient actuators is a challenge for industry, in part because an index for resilience has yet to be established. In this work, several definitions of resilience are analysed and, on the basis of this, an index quantifying resilience for actuators is proposed. This index does indeed allow for the resilience computation of a wide range of manufactured and biological actuators to be compared. The two manufactured actuators chosen as iconic models are a hydraulic cylinder and a bio-inspired McKibben muscle, and these are shown not to be resilient by design. In addition, two biological actuators likely to be resilient were also analysed. The pulvinus resilience index shows that it is partly resilient depending on damage location. But the most promising is the skeletal muscle, which has been shown to be highly resilient. Finally, the bio-inspired roots of resilience are discussed: resilience may originate from multi-scale structural design.

Deformation and mechanics of a pulvinus-inspired material.

Mimosa pudicarapidly folds leaves when touched. Motion is created by pulvini, 'the plant muscles' that allow plants to produce various complex motions. Plants rely on local control of the turgor pressure to create on-demand motion. In this paper, the mechanics of a cellular material inspired from pulvinus ofM. pudicais studied. First, the manufacturing process of a cell-controllable material is described. Its deformation behaviour when pressured is tested, focusing on three pressure patterns of reference. The deformations are modelled based on the minimisation of elastic energy framework. Depending on pressurisation pattern and magnitude, reversible buckling-induced motion may occur.

Transition to stress focusing for locally curved sheets.

A rectangular thin elastic sheet is deformed by forcing a contact between two points at the middle of its length. A transition to buckling with stress focusing is reported for the sheets sufficiently narrow with a critical width proportional to the sheet length with an exponent 2/3 in the small thickness limit. Additionally, a spring network model is solved to explore the thick sheet limit and to validate the scaling behavior of the transition in the thin sheet limit. The numerical results reveal that buckling does not exist for the thickest sheets, and a stability criterion is established for the buckling of a curved sheet.

Predictability in a hydrodynamic pilot-wave system: Resolution of walker tunneling.

A walker is a macroscopic coupling of a droplet and a capillary wave field that exhibits several quantumlike properties. In 2009, Eddi et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 240401 (2009)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.102.240401] showed that walkers may cross a submerged barrier in an unpredictable manner and named this behavior "unpredictable walker tunneling." In quantum mechanics, tunneling is one of the simplest arrangements where similar unpredictability occurs. In this paper, we investigate how unpredictability can be unveiled for walkers through an experimental study of walker tunneling with precision. We refine both time and position measurements to take into account the fast bouncing dynamics of the system. Tunneling is shown to be unpredictable until a distance of 2.6 mm from the barrier center, where we observe the separation of reflected and transmitted trajectories in the position-velocity phase-space. The unpredictability is unlikely to be attributable to either uncertainty in the initial conditions or to the noise in the experiment. It is more likely due to changes in the drop's vertical dynamics arising when it interacts with the barrier. We compare this macroscopic system to a tunneling quantum particle that is subjected to repeated measurements of its position and momentum. We show that, despite the different theoretical treatments of these two disparate systems, similar patterns emerge in the position-velocity phase space.

Aggregation Temperature of Escherichia coli Depends on Steepness of the Thermal Gradient.

Bacterial chemotaxis, the directed migration of bacteria in a gradient of chemoattractant, is one of the most well-studied and well-understood processes in cell biology. On the other hand, bacterial thermotaxis, the directed migration of bacteria in a gradient of temperature, is understood relatively poorly, with somewhat conflicting reports by different groups. One of the reasons for that is the relative technical difficulty of the generation of well-defined gradients of temperature that are sufficiently steep to elicit readily detectable thermotaxis. Here, we used a specially designed microfluidic device to study thermotaxis of Escherichia coli in a broad range of thermal gradients with a high rate of data collection. We found that in shallow temperature gradients with narrow temperature ranges, E. coli tended to aggregate near a sidewall of the gradient channel at either the lowest or the highest temperature. On the other hand, in sufficiently steep gradients with wide temperature ranges, E. coli aggregated at intermediate temperatures, with maximal cell concentrations found away from the sidewalls. We observed this intermediate temperature aggregation in a motility buffer that did not contain any major chemoattractants of E. coli, in contradiction to some previous reports, which suggested that this type of aggregation required the presence of at least one major chemoattractant in the medium. Even more surprisingly, the aggregation temperature strongly depended on the gradient steepness, decreasing by ∼10° as the steepness was increased from 27 to 53°C/mm. Our experiments also highlight the fact that assessments of thermal gradients by changes in fluorescence of temperature-sensitive fluorescent dyes need to account for thermophoresis of the dyes.

Pick up and release of micro-objects: a motion-free method to change the conformity of a capillary contact.

We propose a new 3D-printed capillary gripper equipped with a textured surface for motion-free release. The gripper classically picks up micro-objects thanks to the capillary forces induced by a liquid bridge. Micro-objects are released by decreasing the volume of this bridge through evaporation. The latter can be either natural or speeded up by a heating source (an IR laser or the Joule effect). The volume reduction changes the conformity of the contact between the gripper and the object. We analyze the gripper performance and the capillary force generated, and then we rationalize the release mechanism by defining the concept of contact conformity in the context of capillary forces.

Characterization of interface properties of fluids by evaporation of a capillary bridge.

The surface properties between two non-miscible fluids are key elements to understand mass transfer, chemistry and bio-chemistry at interfaces. In this paper, surface properties are investigated in evaporating and non-evaporating conditions. A capillary bridge between two large plates (similar to a Hele-Shaw cell) is considered. The temporal evolution of surface forces and mass transfers due to evaporation of the liquid are measured. The force depends on surface properties of the substrate. It is adhesive in the wetting case and repulsive in the non-wetting case. The force is also shown to depend linearly on the volume of the capillary bridge F ∝ V 0 and inversely to the height of the bridge. Modelling is performed to characterize both surface force and evaporation properties of the capillary bridge. The evaporation is shown to be diffusion driven and is decoupled from the bridge mechanics.

Interaction of two walkers: Perturbed vertical dynamics as a source of chaos.

Walkers are dual objects comprising a bouncing droplet dynamically coupled to an underlying Faraday wave at the surface of a vibrated bath. In this paper, we study the wave-mediated interaction of two walkers launched at one another, both experimentally and theoretically. Different outcomes are observed in which either the walkers scatter or they bind to each other in orbits or promenade-like motions. The outcome is highly sensitive to initial conditions, which is a signature of chaos, though the time during which perturbations are amplified is finite. The vertical bouncing dynamics, periodic for a single walker, is also strongly perturbed during the interaction, owing to the superposition of the wave contributions of each droplet. Thanks to a model based on inelastic balls coupled to the Faraday waves, we show that this perturbed vertical dynamics is the source of horizontal chaos in such a system.

Foliage motion under wind, from leaf flutter to branch buffeting.

The wind-induced motion of the foliage in a tree is an important phenomenon both for biological issues (photosynthesis, pathogens development or herbivory) and for more subtle effects such as on wi-fi transmission or animal communication. Such foliage motion results from a combination of the motion of the branches that support the leaves, and of the motion of the leaves relative to the branches. Individual leaf dynamics relative to the branch, and branch dynamics have usually been studied separately. Here, in an experimental study on a whole tree in a large-scale wind tunnel, we present the first empirical evidence that foliage motion is actually dominated by individual leaf flutter at low wind velocities, and by branch turbulence buffeting responses at higher velocities. The transition between the two regimes is related to a weak dependence of leaf flutter on wind velocity, while branch turbulent buffeting is strongly dependent on it. Quantitative comparisons with existing engineering-based models of leaf and branch motion confirm the prevalence of these two mechanisms. Simultaneous measurements of the wind-induced drag on the tree and of the light interception by the foliage show the role of an additional mechanism, reconfiguration, whereby leaves bend and overlap, limiting individual leaf flutter. We then discuss the consequences of these findings on the role of wind-mediated phenomena.

Are leaves optimally designed for self-support? An investigation on giant monocots.

Leaves are the organs that intercept light and create photosynthesis. Efficient light interception is provided by leaves oriented orthogonal to most of the sun rays. Except in the polar regions, this means orthogonal to the direction of acceleration due to gravity, or simply horizontal. The leaves of almost all terrestrial plants grow in a gravity field that tends to bend them downward and therefore may counteract light interception. Plants thus allocate biomass for self-support in order to maintain their leaves horizontal. To compete with other species (inter-species competition), as well as other individuals within the same species (intra-species competition), self-support must be achieved with the least biomass produced. This study examines to what extent leaves are designed to self-support. We show here that a basic mechanical model provides the optimal dimensions of a leaf for light interception and self-support. These results are compared to measurements made on leaves of various giant monocot species, especially palm trees and banana trees. The comparison between experiments and model predictions shows that the longer palms are optimally designed for self-support whereas shorter leaves are shaped predominantly by other parameters of selection.

How a curved elastic strip opens.

An elastic strip is transversely clamped in a curved frame. The induced curvature decreases as the strip opens and connects to its flat natural shape. Various ribbon profiles are measured and the scaling law for the opening length validates a description where the in-plane stretching gradually relaxes the bending stress. An analytical model of the strip profile is proposed and a quantitative agreement is found with both experiments and simulations of the plates equations. This result provides a unique illustration of smooth nondevelopable solutions in thin sheets.

Wind and gravity mechanical effects on leaf inclination angles.

In a tree, the distribution of leaf inclination angles plays an important role in photosynthesis and water interception. We investigate here the effect of mechanical deformations of leaves due to wind or their own weight on this distribution. First, the specific role of the geometry of the tree is identified and shown to be weak, using models of idealized tree and tools of statistical mechanics. Then the deformation of individual leaves under gravity or wind is quantified experimentally. New dimensionless parameters are proposed, and used in simple models of these deformations. By combining models of tree geometry and models of leaf deformation, we explore the role of all mechanical parameters on the Leaf Inclination Angle Distributions. These are found to have a significant influence, which is exemplified finally in computations of direct light interception by idealized trees.