Slender Structures: Mechanics, Design, and Application

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Background

Slender structures are ubiquitous in nature and industry, from human hair to plant limbs, thin films, strings, or pipes. Featured by their notable slenderness ratio in geometry, slender structures are often described by columns, rods, plates, and shells. The geometric and topology nonlinearity of slender structures often arise even if the material properties remain linear, leading to dramatic shape change and structural instability under different loading conditions. Such behaviors have shown merits in a broad field of design and application scenarios such as flexible electronics, bio-integrated devices, three-dimensional assembly, and lattice materials. Therefore, understanding the mechanics of slender structures is of fundamental significance in unraveling pattern-formation mechanisms in nature, preventing failures in engineering structures, and designing novel devices with advanced functionality.

Slender structures have been long studied in history. Familiar approximate theories include Euler–Bernoulli beam theory, Euler’s Elastica, Kirchhoff’s rod theory, plate theory, etc. Theoretical investigations remain very active now, particularly due to recent advances in flexible electronics, soft robotics, and low-dimensional materials in which novel, unconventional slender structures appear and find a range of applications. For example, tremendous efforts have been committed to the buckling of thin films, snapping of elastic shells, and wrinkling of ultrathin polymeric and two-dimensional materials. In addition, the mechanics of slender structures have been recently coupled with chemistry and physics. A concrete example is the emerging active materials that are slender, capable of shape morphing in response to external stimuli (such as magnetoactive guidewire robots, dielectric thin film, hydrogels elastomers), and hold great promise in human-machine interface, biomedical engineering, and artificial intelligence.

This Research Topic of Frontiers in Mechanical Engineering aims at collecting recent advances/findings in slender structures from fundamental mechanics, structural design, to advanced applications using theoretical analysis, numerical simulations, and experimental approaches. Original research articles, reviews, mini-review papers are welcome.

The scope of the article collection includes, but is not limited to the following topics:

• Active slender structures
• Micro/nano slender structures
• Low-dimensional materials
• Instability of slender structures
• Inverse design of slender structures
• Mechanical characterization of slender structures and their interfaces
• Slender structures in biology

Keywords: slender structures, instability, nonlinear, thin film, low-dimensional materials

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