Textiles are ubiquitous in both daily life and crucial industrial sectors, but their mechanics remain extremely difficult to predict quantitatively. Textiles are composed of many slender threads intertwined together to create a surface.  The ingredients at the core of their mechanics are then what typical mechanical engineering tools are afraid of: large displacements of slender objects, a multitude of contacts, and frictional interactions. 

In this seminar, I will introduce how concepts borrowed from soft matter physics may help rationalize some aspects of textile mechanics, with a focus on very deformable knitted fabrics.

Poincloux S., Adda-Bedia M., & Lechenault F. (2018). Geometry and elasticity of a knitted fabric. PRX, 8(2), 021075
Poincloux S., Adda-Bedia M., & Lechenault F. (2018). Crackling dynamics in the mechanical response of knitted fabrics. PRL, 121(5), 058002
Crassous J., Poincloux S., & Steinberger A. (2024). Metastability of a Periodic Network of Threads: Shapes of a Knitted Fabric. PRL, 133(24), 248201

Dr Samuel Poincloux's research, at the intersection between soft matter physics, non-equilibrium statistical physics, and mechanical engineering, aims to explore and understand the emergent mechanical properties of soft assemblies. Poincloux's education took place in the center of Paris, first at the engineering school ESPCI Paris, then at the Physics Department of École Normale Supérieure with his PhD supervisors Mokhtar Adda-Bedia and Frédéric Lechenault. Poincloux's postdoctoral journey started in the Mechanical Engineering Department of EPFL in Switzerland with Pedro Reis to work on slender structure mechanics. Then, as a JSPS postdoctoral fellow, Poincloux joined the Physics Department of The University of Tokyo with Kazumasa Takeuchi to work on the non-equilibrium statistical physics of soft granular particles. In April 2024, he started an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Physical Sciences of Aoyama Gakuin University, in the laboratory of Hiroshi Matsukawa.