Elasticity-controlled jamming criticality in soft composite solids.

Soft composite solids are made of inclusions dispersed within soft matrices. They are ubiquitous in nature and form the basis of many biological tissues. In the field of materials science, synthetic soft composites are promising candidates for building various engineering devices due to their highly programmable features. However, when the volume fraction of the inclusions increases, predicting the mechanical properties of these materials poses a significant challenge for the classical theories of composite mechanics. The difficulty arises from the inherently disordered, multi-scale interactions between the inclusions and the matrix. To address this challenge, we systematically investigated the mechanics of densely filled soft elastomers containing stiff microspheres. We experimentally demonstrate how the strain-stiffening response of the soft composites is governed by the critical scalings in the vicinity of a shear-jamming transition of the included particles. The proposed criticality framework quantitatively connects the overall mechanics of a soft composite with the elasticity of the matrix and the particles, and captures the diverse mechanical responses observed across a wide range of material parameters. The findings uncover a novel design paradigm of composite mechanics that relies on engineering the jamming properties of the embedded inclusions.

Shear-Jammed, Fragile, and Steady States in Homogeneously Strained Granular Materials.

We study the jamming phase diagram of sheared granular material using a novel Couette shear setup with a multiring bottom. The setup uses small basal friction forces to apply a volume-conserving linear shear with no shear band to a granular system composed of frictional photoelastic discs. The setup can generate arbitrarily large shear strain due to its circular geometry, and the shear direction can be reversed, allowing us to measure a feature that distinguishes shear-jammed from fragile states. We report systematic measurements of the stress, strain, and contact network structure at phase boundaries that have been difficult to access by traditional experimental techniques, including the yield stress curve and the jamming curve close to ϕ_{SJ}≈0.75, the smallest packing fraction supporting a shear-jammed state. We observe fragile states created under large shear strain over a range of ϕ<ϕ_{SJ}. We also find a transition in the character of the quasistatic steady flow centered around ϕ_{SJ} on the yield curve as a function of packing fraction. Near ϕ_{SJ}, the average contact number, fabric anisotropy, and nonrattler fraction all show a change of slope. Above ϕ_{F}≈0.7 the steady flow shows measurable deviations from the basal linear shear profile, and above ϕ_{b}≈0.78 the flow is localized in a shear band.