PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Variety in building block softness makes for softer amorphous materials

New model for disordered solids reveals traits behind microscopic force transmission

Variety in building block softness makes for softer amorphous materials
2024-05-04
(Press-News.org)

Tokyo, Japan – Scientists from Tokyo Metropolitan University have created a new model for disordered materials to study how amorphous materials resist stress. They treated groups of atoms and molecules as squishy spheres with varying softness. Putting their model under a load, they discovered unexpected disparities between harder regions and where forces were concentrated, with areas in between such regions “hardening” to produce elongated “force chains”. Their findings promise new insights into designing better materials.

 

When it comes to building hard materials, using hard ingredients is not enough. For example, when concrete fails during earthquakes, the forces which are generated become focused in certain places, causing cracks to form. The transmission of forces through amorphous solids like concrete and cement is known to follow well-defined paths known as “force chains.” Deciphering how they emerge would go a long way to understanding how such solids behave under stress, but it is not yet known how they emerge, and how they relate to material properties.

This inspired a team of researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University led by Professor Rei Kurita to build simple, tractable models of amorphous materials which might teach us how force chains form. Instead of simply simulating the motion of all atoms in some material, they decided to represent groups of atoms with spheres of varying stiffness, reflecting how those groups respond to forces. The materials they studied were then characterized by how much the stiffnesses varied over space, and how broad the patterns of hard and soft regions were.

Deforming their array of squishy particles, they firstly looked for whether local stiffness correlated with force chain transmission. Initially, it seemed like there was a clear correlation between harder regions and force chains. However, further analysis reveals that force chains are more string-like in their shape, and don’t correlate as well with isolated hard regions. To understand this discrepancy, the team studied a simpler model of two stiff regions separated by a softer region, finding that the softer region becomes denser, generating the high forces required to keep the chain going. This is a first glimpse into the fundamental mechanics of how force chains connect.

But how do these variations affect the properties of the material? It turns out that larger variations in softness and broader soft/hard regions both lead to consistently softer materials, as does larger variations in local density. The conclusion we can draw is that even with the same building blocks, amorphous materials with a more uniform stiffness gives a harder material due to more even distribution of the force chains.

While the emergence of stiffness variations in real materials remains unexplored, the team hope their new model and mechanism pave the way for design principles to make better materials.

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 20K14431 and 20H01874.

 

END


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Variety in building block softness makes for softer amorphous materials Variety in building block softness makes for softer amorphous materials 2 Variety in building block softness makes for softer amorphous materials 3

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Tennis greats Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova honored at A Conversation With a Living Legend®

Tennis greats Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova honored at A Conversation With a Living Legend®
2024-05-04
HOUSTON ― Cancer survivors and tennis legends Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova participated in a fireside-style chat on Wednesday, May 1, at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s signature event, A Conversation with a Living Legend ®, hosted at the Post Oak Hotel at Uptown Houston. The sold-out event raised more than $1.5 million for cell therapy research at MD Anderson with a ticketed audience of 800+. Past Living Legend honoree and co-anchor of ABC’s Good Morning America, Robin Roberts, led the onstage interview with Evert and Navratilova, and ABC13 Houston’s ...

Seismic waves used to track LA’s groundwater recharge after record wet winter

2024-05-04
Record-setting storms in 2023 filled California’s major reservoirs to the brim, providing some relief in a decades-long drought, but how much of that record rain trickled underground? Shujuan Mao of Stanford University and her colleagues used a surprising technique to answer this question for the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. They analyzed changes in the velocity of seismic waves traveling through the LA basin, tracking these changes in space and time between January and October 2023. As Mao reported at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)’s 2024 Annual Meeting, ...

When injecting pure spin into chiral materials, direction matters

2024-05-03
Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Pittsburgh studied how the spin information of an electron, called a pure spin current, moves through chiral materials. They found that the direction in which the spins are injected into chiral materials affects their ability to pass through them. These chiral “gateways” could be used to design energy-efficient spintronic devices for data storage, communication and computing. Spintronic devices harness the spin of an electron, rather than its charge, to create current and move information through electronic devices.  “One of the goals in spintronics ...

New quantum sensing scheme could lead to enhanced high-precision nanoscopic techniques

New quantum sensing scheme could lead to enhanced high-precision nanoscopic techniques
2024-05-03
Researchers from the University of Portsmouth have unveiled a quantum sensing scheme that achieves the pinnacle of quantum sensitivity in measuring the transverse displacement between two interfering photons. This new technique has the potential to enhance superresolution imaging techniques that already employ single-photon sources as probes for the localization and tracking of biological samples, such as single-molecule localization microscopy with quantum dots. Traditionally, achieving ultra-high precision in nanoscopic techniques has been constrained by the limitations of standard imaging methods, such as the diffraction limit ...

New MSU research: Are carbon-capture models effective?

2024-05-03
MSU has a satellite uplink/LTN TV studio and Comrex line for radio interviews upon request. EAST LANSING, Mich. – Reforestation efforts to restock depleted forests are important for addressing climate change and for both capturing and restoring carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere. These types of solutions to mitigate carbon emissions are critical after 2023 proved to be the warmest year on record. However, some models have been found to be inaccurate. New research from Michigan State University has found the carbon removal potential of some reforestation models have been over exaggerated ...

One vaccine, many cancers

2024-05-03
Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a type of blood cancer that forms in the soft marrow of the bones, typically attacking cells that would otherwise form the key component of the body’s immunodefense system, white blood cells. In a new study published in Blood Advances, researchers from the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering’s Hubbell Lab created with a novel approach to develop in-situ cancer vaccines that could increase the effectiveness of immunotherapies in AML and other blood ...

nTIDE April 2024 Jobs Report: Post-pandemic gains seen in employment for people with disabilities appear to continue

nTIDE April 2024 Jobs Report: Post-pandemic gains seen in employment for people with disabilities appear to continue
2024-05-03
East Hanover, NJ – May 3, 2024 – Following a two-month decline, the employment of individuals with disabilities returns to near historic highs reported by nTIDE in late 2023, reaffirming the significance of those prior highs. That’s according to today’s National Trends in Disability Employment – semi-monthly update (nTIDE), issued by Kessler Foundation and the University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability (UNH-IOD). Month-to-Month nTIDE Numbers (comparing March 2024 to April 2024) “Following two months of decline, individuals with disabilities are now edging back towards their near ...

Exploring oncogenic driver molecular alterations in Hispanic/Latin American cancer patients

Exploring oncogenic driver molecular alterations in Hispanic/Latin American cancer patients
2024-05-03
“[...] this editorial underscores the complex molecular diagnosis landscape of cancer in the [Latin American] population.” BUFFALO, NY- May 3, 2024 – A new editorial paper was published in Oncoscience (Volume 11) on April 22, 2024, entitled, “Exploring oncogenic driver molecular alterations in Hispanic/Latin American cancer patients: A call for enhanced molecular understanding.” In this new editorial, researcher Rafael Parra-Medina from Fundación Universitaria de Ciencias de la Salud and Instituto Nacional de Cancerología begins by discussing Latin America’s (LA) population — a heterogeneous mix ...

Hungry, hungry white dwarfs: solving the puzzle of stellar metal pollution

Hungry, hungry white dwarfs: solving the puzzle of stellar metal pollution
2024-05-03
Dead stars known as white dwarfs, have a mass like the Sun while being similar in size to Earth. They are common in our galaxy, as 97% of stars are white dwarfs. As stars reach the end of their lives, their cores collapse into the dense ball of a white dwarf, making our galaxy seem like an ethereal graveyard.  Despite their prevalence, the chemical makeup of these stellar remnants has been a conundrum for astronomers for years. The presence of heavy metal elements—like silicon, magnesium, and calcium—on the surface of many of these compact objects is a perplexing ...

New study reveals how teens thrive online: factors that shape digital success revealed

2024-05-03
A new study co-authored by Sophie Janicke-Bowles, associate professor in Chapman University’s School of Communication, sheds light on the role that new and traditional media play in promoting and affecting character development, emotions, prosocial behavior and well-being (aka happiness) in youth.  Her research and teaching focus on positive psychology, media and new communication technologies, and media and spirituality. The study, published April 13 in Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), investigates how adolescents perceive ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Interactive apps, AI chatbots promote playfulness, reduce privacy concerns

How NIL boosts college football’s competitive balance

Moffitt researchers develop machine learning model to predict urgent care visits for lung cancer patients

Construction secrets of honeybees: Study reveals how bees build hives in tricky spots

Wheat disease losses total $2.9 billion across the United States and Canada between 2018 and 2021

New funding fuels development of first potentially regenerative treatment for multiple sclerosis

NJIT student–faculty team wins best presentation award for ant swarm simulation

Ants defend plants from herbivores but can hinder pollination

When the wireless data runs dry

Inquiry into the history of science shows an early “inherence” bias

Picky eaters endure: Ecologists use DNA to explore diet breadth of wild herbivores

Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time

Increasing the level of the protein PI31 demonstrates neuroprotective effects in mice

Multi-energy X-ray curved surface imaging-with multi-layer in-situ grown scintillators

Metasurface enables compact and high-sensitivity atomic magnetometer

PFAS presence confirmed in the blood of children in Gipuzkoa

Why do people believe lies?

SwRI installs private 5G network for research, development, testing and evaluation

A new perspective in bone metabolism: Targeting the lysosome–iron–mitochondria axis for osteoclast regulation

Few military spouses use formal support services during, after deployment

Breakthrough in the hunt for light dark matter: QROCODILE project reveals world-leading constraints

2D x-ray imaging technique reveals hidden processes in CO2 electrolyzers

Rational high entropy doping strategy via modular in-situ/post solvothermal doping integration for microwave absorption

Circular Economy has been officially included in the ESCI

Recent advances in exciton-polariton in perovskite

Efficacy and safety of GLP-1 RAs in children and adolescents with obesity or type 2 diabetes

Over-the-counter sales of overdose reversal drug naloxone decline after initial surge

Global trends and disparities in social isolation

Country of birth, race, ethnicity, and prenatal depression

Kissick Family Foundation, Milken Institute announce $2 million in funding for frontotemporal dementia research and new call for proposals

[Press-News.org] Variety in building block softness makes for softer amorphous materials
New model for disordered solids reveals traits behind microscopic force transmission