Effective medium theory of semiflexible filamentous networks

Abstract

We develop an effective medium approach to the mechanics of disordered, semiflexible polymer networks and study the response of such networks to uniform and nonuniform strain. We identify distinct elastic regimes in which the contributions of either filament bending or stretching to the macroscopic modulus vanish. We also show that our effective medium theory predicts a crossover between affine and non-affine strain, consistent with both prior numerical studies and scaling theory.

4 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Elasticity of Stiff Polymer Networks
• Visualizing the strain field in semiflexible polymer networks: strain fluctuations and nonlinear rheology of F-actin gels

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