Committee Members:

Dr. Saad Bhamla, Advisor, ChBE

Dr. Satish Kumar, Co-advisor, MSE

Dr. Donggang Yao, MSE

ABSTRACT

Entanglements are everywhere, ranging from living systems such as worm blobs that can dynamically control their entanglement to non-woven materials found inside face masks. We designed an experiment to observe the dynamical response of a tangle of cotton fibers hanging by one of its entangled threads. Experiments were performed on a range of frequencies. This uncovered a resonant behavior in the tangle response as a function of the agitation frequency. It helped us to create a deterministic analog of the tangle by sewing a cotton gauze tape with fiber in pre-determined stitch patterns. We find that such a deterministic system with controlled parameters, i.e., its mass and stitch pattern, behaves similarly to a stochastically produced tangled system. To observe and understand the packing of stochastically generated tangles, we used micro-CT to perform a 3D visualization of the tangle topology. In the future, we could also study the force required to extract a thread from the tangle. This could help us construct a topological model that can pave the way for inventing metamaterials with tunable dynamical responses.