Jennifer Rieser

Identifying Structural Flow Defects in Disordered Solids Using Machine-Learning Methods

We use machine-learning methods on local structure to identify flow defects-or particles susceptible to rearrangement-in jammed and glassy systems. We apply this method successfully to two very different systems: a two-dimensional experimental realization of a granular pillar under compression and a Lennard-Jones glass in both two and three dimensions above and below its glass transition temperature. We also identify characteristics of flow defects that differentiate them from the rest of the sample. Our results show it is possible to discern subtle structural features responsible for heterogeneous dynamics observed across a broad range of disordered materials.

Rheology of soft colloids across the onset of rigidity: scaling behavior, thermal, and non-thermal responses

We study the rheological behavior of colloidal suspensions composed of soft sub-micron-size hydrogel particles across the liquid-solid transition. The measured stress and strain-rate data, when normalized by thermal stress and time scales, suggest our systems reside in a regime wherein thermal effects are important. In a different vein, critical point scaling predictions for the jamming transition, typical in athermal systems, are tested. Near dynamic arrest, the suspensions exhibit scaling exponents similar to those reported in Nordstrom et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2010, 105, 175701. The observation suggests that our system exhibits a glass transition near the onset of rigidity, but it also exhibits a jamming-like scaling further from the transition point. These observations are thought-provoking in light of recent theoretical and simulation findings, which show that suspension rheology across the full range of microgel particle experiments can exhibit both thermal and athermal mechanisms.

Structure-property relationships from universal signatures of plasticity in disordered solids

Behavioral universality across size scales Glassy materials are characterized by a lack of long-range order, whether at the atomic level or at much larger length scales. But to what extent is their commonality in the behavior retained at these different scales? Cubuk et al. used experiments and simulations to show universality across seven orders of magnitude in length. Particle rearrangements in such systems are mediated by defects that are on the order of a few particle diameters. These rearrangements correlate with the materials softness and yielding behavior. Science, this issue p. 1033 A range of particle-based and glassy systems show universal features of the onset of plasticity and a universal yield strain. When deformed beyond their elastic limits, crystalline solids flow plastically via particle rearrangements localized around structural defects. Disordered solids also flow, but without obvious structural defects. We link structure to plasticity in disordered solids via a microscopic structural quantity, “softness,” designed by machine learning to be maximally predictive of rearrangements. Experimental results and computations enabled us to measure the spatial correlations and strain response of softness, as well as two measures of plasticity: the size of rearrangements and the yield strain. All four quantities maintained remarkable commonality in their values for disordered packings of objects ranging from atoms to grains, spanning seven orders of magnitude in diameter and 13 orders of magnitude in elastic modulus. These commonalities link the spatial correlations and strain response of softness to rearrangement size and yield strain, respectively.

Tail use improves performance on soft substrates in models of early vertebrate land locomotors

Animal and robot experiments explore the use of a tail in aiding terrestrial locomotion. In the evolutionary transition from an aquatic to a terrestrial environment, early tetrapods faced the challenges of terrestrial locomotion on flowable substrates, such as sand and mud of variable stiffness and incline. The morphology and range of motion of appendages can be revealed in fossils; however, biological and robophysical studies of modern taxa have shown that movement on such substrates can be sensitive to small changes in appendage use. Using a biological model (the mudskipper), a physical robot model, granular drag measurements, and theoretical tools from geometric mechanics, we demonstrate how tail use can improve robustness to variable limb use and substrate conditions. We hypothesize that properly coordinated tail movements could have provided a substantial benefit for the earliest vertebrates to move on land.

Deformation-driven diffusion and plastic flow in amorphous granular pillars.

We report a combined experimental and simulation study of deformation-induced diffusion in compacted quasi-two-dimensional amorphous granular pillars, in which thermal fluctuations play a negligible role. The pillars, consisting of bidisperse cylindrical acetal plastic particles standing upright on a substrate, are deformed uniaxially and quasistatically by a rigid bar moving at a constant speed. The plastic flow and particle rearrangements in the pillars are characterized by computing the best-fit affine transformation strain and nonaffine displacement associated with each particle between two stages of deformation. The nonaffine displacement exhibits exponential crossover from ballistic to diffusive behavior with respect to the cumulative deviatoric strain, indicating that in athermal granular packings, the cumulative deviatoric strain plays the role of time in thermal systems and drives effective particle diffusion. We further study the size-dependent deformation of the granular pillars by simulation, and find that different-sized pillars follow self-similar shape evolution during deformation. In addition, the yield stress of the pillars increases linearly with pillar size. Formation of transient shear lines in the pillars during deformation becomes more evident as pillar size increases. The width of these elementary shear bands is about twice the diameter of a particle, and does not vary with pillar size.

Tunable Capillary-Induced Attraction between Vertical Cylinders

Deformation of a fluid interface caused by the presence of objects at the interface can lead to large lateral forces between objects. We explore these fluid-mediated attractive force between partially submerged vertical cylinders. Forces are experimentally measured by slowly separating cylinder pairs and cylinder triplets after capillary rise is initially established for cylinders in contact. For cylinder pairs, numerical computations and a theoretical model are found to be in good agreement with measurements. The model provides insight into the relative importance of the contributions to the total force. For small separations, the lateral force is dominated by the fluid pressure acting over the wetted cylinder surfaces. At large separations, the surface tension acting along the contact line dominates the lateral force. A crossover between the two regimes occurs at a separation of around half of a capillary length. The experimentally measured forces between cylinder triplets are also in good agreement with numerical computations, and we show that pairwise contributions account for nearly all of the attractive force between triplets. For cylinders with an equilibrium capillary rise height greater than the height of the cylinder, we find that the attractive force depends on the height of the cylinders above the submersion level, which provides a means to create precisely controlled tunable cohesive forces between objects deforming a fluid interface.

Divergence of Voronoi Cell Anisotropy Vector: A Threshold-Free Characterization of Local Structure in Amorphous Materials.

Characterizing structural inhomogeneity is an essential step in understanding the mechanical response of amorphous materials. We introduce a threshold-free measure based on the field of vectors pointing from the center of each particle to the centroid of the Voronoi cell in which the particle resides. These vectors tend to point in toward regions of high free volume and away from regions of low free volume, reminiscent of sinks and sources in a vector field. We compute the local divergence of these vectors, where positive values correspond to overpacked regions and negative values identify underpacked regions within the material. Distributions of this divergence are nearly Gaussian with zero mean, allowing for structural characterization using only the moments of the distribution. We explore how the standard deviation and skewness vary with the packing fraction for simulations of bidisperse systems and find a kink in these moments that coincides with the jamming transition.

Geometric Mechanics Applied to Tetrapod Locomotion on Granular Media

This study probes the underlying locomotion principles of earliest organisms that could both swim and walk. We hypothesize that properly coordinated leg and body movements could have provided a substantial benefit toward locomotion on complex media, such as early crawling on sand. In this extended abstract, we summarize some of our recent advances in integrating biology, physics and robotics to gain insight into tetrapod locomotor coordination and control principles. Here, we observe crawling salamanders as a biological model for studying tetrapod locomotion on sloped granular substrates. Further, geometric mechanics tools are used to provide a theoretical framework predicting efficacious body motions on yielding terrain. Finally, we employ these coordination strategies on a robophysical salamander model traversing a sandy slope. This analysis of salamander-like robotic motion in granular media can be seen as a first application of how tools from geometric mechanics can provide insight into the character and principles of legged locomotion.

Collisional Diffraction Emerges from Simple Control of Limbless Locomotion

Snakes can utilize obstacles to move through complex terrain, but the development of robots with similar capabilities is hindered by our understanding of how snakes manage the forces arising from interactions with heterogeneities. To discover principles of how and when to use potential obstacles, we studied a desert-dwelling snake, C. occipitalis, which uses a serpenoid template to move on homogeneous granular materials. We tested the snake in a model terrestrial terrain—a single row of vertical posts—and compared its performance with a robophysical model. Interaction with the post array resulted in reorientation of trajectories away from the initial heading. Combining trajectories from multiple trials revealed an emergent collisional diffraction pattern in the final heading. The pattern appears in both the living and robot snake. Furthermore, the pattern persisted when we changed the maximum torque output of the robot motors from 1.5 N-m to 0.38 N-m in which case local deformation of the robot from the serpenoid curve appears during interaction with the posts. This suggests the emergent collisional diffraction pattern is a general feature of these systems. We posit that open-loop control of the serpenoid template in sparse terrains is a simple and effective means to progress, but if adherence to a heading is desired more sophisticated control is needed.