Section: Dissemination

Popularization

Alejandro Blumentals and Florence Bertails-Descoubes have participated in the new showroom “login”, by setting up a fiber demo. The demo allows a user to manipulate a real fiber by moving and twisting the ends, creating self-coiling structures called plectonema. In parallel to real manipulations, a simulation reproduces in real-time the deformations of a rod undergoing the same constraints, which reveals similar patterns compared to the real experiment. The simulation relies upon the optimal control framework set up by Alejandro Blumentals in his PhD thesis, which allows to simulate the quasistatic deformation of a thin elastic rod in the presence of self-contact.