Many natural and man-made materials met in daily life but also technical applications are characterized by two features: They are soft, i.e. highly deformable under moderate loads, and, in effect, they represent materials systems or composites if considered at an appropriately small scale. Materials with a network microstructure are particular examples. The features on a small scale often give rise to particular macroscopic mechanical behaviors such as strongly nonlinear stress-responses, unusual kinematics or particular fracture properties.
The group founded in 2015 deals with the development of mathematical models of soft materials systems, advanced techniques to inform these models from dedicated experiments and numerical simulation methods for use in analytical and predictive computational tools. The fields of application include elastomers, biological tissues as well as bioinspired and biomedical materials.