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Equilibrium and stability analysis of slender elastic rods
New interesting challenges arise in the mechanics of slender elastic rods with the burgeoning of new scientific fields such as soft materials, nanotechnologies, stretchable electronics or even physical computer animation. One of the common emerging concerns is the efficient modeling of the very large deformations of these structures, often in atypical surrounding environments. In this talk, I will present some original and relatively simple numerical tools and models, based on a dynamical system approach, to compute and follow the equilibrium and stability of slender elastic rods. Notably, I will show the relevance and performance of our methods in various mechanical problems, from the self-oscillations of a nanowire in field emission to the physics of a curly hair or the design of piezoelectric beams as frequency multipliers.