Instabilities in Solids Across the Scales

The objective of this minisymposium is to bring together researchers working on instabilities in solids across a vast range of scales. Since instabilities can be viewed as initial indicators of material damage and failure, knowledge on how such instabilities arise and evolve is essential to describe, predict, and ultimately design complex materials and structures in engineering applications and understand complex mechanisms in biological systems and medical applications.

This minisymposium aims to create synergies between researchers from computational geology, computational materials science, and computational biomechanics. Understanding instabilities ranging from scales as large as those arising in the earth curst leading to material flow over time scales of up to hundred of million years to instabilities arising during material fabrication for stretchable electronic materials, and instabilities causing the folding of the brain requires the development of advanced theories, computational methods, and experimental techniques. We hope to bring together experts working on these different aspects of instabilities to review and share the latest advancements in this exciting research field.

Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to:
- computational techniques to overcome challenges related to model instabilities in materials and structures across the scales
- geometric and material instabilities in soft engineered materials such as gels, polymers, and polymer systems
- growth induced instabilities in soft biological tissues or the brain
- thermo-mechanical instabilities in computational geology
- wrinkling, creasing, and folding in thin films and substrate systems
- instabilities in polymer blend systems or additive manufacturing applications
- bifurcation in structural solids in the form of buckling and snap-through phenomena