Importance of non-affine viscoelastic response in disordered fibre networks

Abstract

Disordered fibre networks are ubiquitous in nature and have a wide range of industrial applications as novel biomaterials. Predicting their viscoelastic response is straightforward for affine deformations that are uniform over all length scales, but when affinity fails, as has been observed experimentally, modelling becomes challenging. Here we introduce a numerical methodology to predict the steady-state viscoelastic spectra and degree of affinity for disordered fibre networks driven at arbitrary frequencies. Applying this method to a peptide gel model reveals a monotonic increase of the shear modulus as the soft, non-affine normal modes are successively suppressed as the driving frequency increases. In addition to being dominated by fibril bending, these low frequency network modes are also shown to be delocalised. The presented methodology provides insights into the importance of non-affinity in the viscoelastic response of peptide gels, and is easily extendible to all types of fibre networks.

5 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Unifying interatomic potential, g(r), elasticity, viscosity, and fragility of metallic glasses: analytical model, simulations, and experiments
• Microrheological approach for the viscoelastic response of gels
• Non-affinity and fluid-coupled viscoelastic plateau for immersed fiber networks
• On the relationship between the plateau modulus and the threshold frequency in peptide gels
• Microrheology of semiflexible filament solutions based on relaxation simulations
• Nonlinear master relation in microscopic mechanical response of semiflexible biopolymer networks