Flow properties of the voronoi model

• Main Author: Shawn Khuhan Samidurai
• Other Authors: Massimo Pica Ciamarra
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Science
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/74155
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The characteristics of amorphous materials and their mechanical responses is significantly harder to predict then their regular-solid counter parts. This is due to nature of the structure of amorphous materials, forming mesoscopic sized structures. In the absence of the regular crystalline lattice present in most solids, amorphous materials behave remarkably different when subjected to changes in temperature, pressure or strain. Different models and energy profiles have been used to study amorphous materials. Recently it has been documented that biological cells have been observed to exhibit amorphous like qualities, of which the Voronoi and Vertex models have been developed. We study the novel concept of shearing of the Voronoi model to document its flow event and rigidity transition in an energy-minimized simulation. In examining the model, cell movement and transition events are established to cause rigidity transitions. We study the limit of deformation of transition events to propose a hard-limit before an exchange of neighbors is required and foreshadow a possible flow of the Voronoi model. Additionally, we document the effect of strain on the Voronoi cells in terms of short and long length scale order. We identify that strain causes the Voronoi tessellations to become increasingly ordered and elliptical in nature, increasing the orderliness of the system. The effects of this increase in orderliness is then examined for its implications on flow.