Effect of connectivity on the elasticity of athermal network materials

Abstract

Network materials with stochastic structure are ubiquitous in biology and engineering, which drives the current interest in establishing relations between their structure and mechanical behavior. In this work we focus on the effect of connectivity defined by the number of fibers emerging from a crosslink, z, and compare networks with identical (z-homogeneous) and distinct (z-heterogeneous) z at the crosslinks. We observe that the functional form of strain stiffening is z-independent, and that the central z-dependent parameter is the small strain stiffness, E₀. We confirm previous results indicating that the functional form of E₀(z) is a power function with 3 regimes and observe that this applies to a broad range of z. However, the scaling exponents are different in the z-homogeneous and z-heterogeneous cases. We confirm that increasing z across the Maxwell's central force isostatic point leads to a transition from bending to axial energy storage. However, we observe that this does not necessarily imply that deformation becomes affine in the large z limit. In fact, networks of fibers with low bending stiffness retain a relaxation mode based on the rotational degree of freedom of the crosslinks which allows E₀ in the large z limit to be smaller than the affine model prediction. We also conclude that in the z-heterogeneous case, the mean connectivity is sufficient to evaluate the effect of connectivity on E₀ and that higher moments of the distribution of z are less important.