Title: Self-organized mechanics of a bird nest

Author (Invited): Hunter King, Rutgers University

Abstract:

Disordered packings of unbonded, semiflexible, athermal fibers represent a class of material that appears in a variety of contexts and scales. From the twig-based bird nest to unwoven textiles to the tangled collagen fibrils within tendons, disparate systems display some shared, unusual mechanical behavior. Upon motivating our partly-bioinspired perspective on these materials, I will present measurements of mechanical response under oedometric compression for both an experimental instance of tangled wooden sticks and its one-to-one computational analog. Using observed motion of internal contacts, I will propose micromechanical interpretation for characteristic non-linear stiffness and quasi-static hysteresis we believe is common to this class of material. Finally, I will revisit avian construction to motivate questions for future research.