Extensional flow is a major type of deformation in many polymer processing operations such as blow molding and fiber spinning. Extensional rheology of polymer melts is highly sensitive to molecular architecture and conformation. In the past four decades, people have made a great effort to study the dynamics of polymer chains in extensional flow in order to predict the rheological behaviour by...
Hydrogels built from DNA are an attractive class of materials, whose structure and mechanical properties can be tuned by the design of “physical” cross-links based on selective Watson-Crick base pairing [Pan, Soft Matter 12,5537 (2016)]. Even simple systems of entangled DNA helices can display complex mechanical response, such as shear banding [Boukany, Soft Matter 5,780 (2009)] and strain...
