In this work, we study the mechanical behavior of non-crosslinked networks of fibers that interact adhe- sively. Adhesion drives fiber organization into bundles and a network of fiber bundles forms as a result of this process. Bundles split and re-connect forming specific triangular features at all bundle intersections, with role in network stabilization. The structure of such networks has been discussed in the literature, but their mechanics remains largely unexplored. We show here that such networks are exceptionally sta- ble, and despite the absence of crosslinks between fibers behave, at relatively small strains, essentially similar to crosslinked networks, in which the role of crosslinks is played by the triangular structures at bundle intersections. We also provide new results regarding the effect of the network architecture on the type of strain stiffening observed in tension. The results apply to carbon nanotube structures, such as buckypaper, and various connective biological tissue in which collagen fibrils form bundles and the tissue is a network of collagen fibril bundles.
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Social stratification in networks: insights from co-authorship networks
It has been observed that real-world social networks often exhibit stratification along economic or other lines, with consequences for class mobility and access to opportunities. With the rise in human interaction data and extensive use of online social networks, the structure of social networks (representing connections between individuals) can be used for measuring stratification. However, although stratification has been studied extensively in the social sciences, there is no single, generally applicable metric for measuring the level of stratification in a network. In this work, we first propose the novel Stratification Assortativity (StA) metric, which measures the extent to which a network is stratified into different tiers. Then, we use the StA metric to perform an in-depth analysis of the stratification of five co-authorship networks. We examine the evolution of these networks over 50 years and show that these fields demonstrate an increasing level of stratification over time, and, correspondingly, the trajectory of a researcher’s career is increasingly correlated with her entry point into the network.
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- PAR ID:
- 10462520
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of The Royal Society Interface
- Volume:
- 20
- Issue:
- 198
- ISSN:
- 1742-5662
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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