Infrastructure That Confines: Collective Mechanics and the Jamming Transition in Cellular Water Structures

An assembly of individually soft, water-filled natural rubber latex (NRL) elements becomes collectively rigid when those elements are arranged in sufficient number and geometrically confined. This paper names, formalises, and quantifies that transition. We apply the jamming-transition framework and the Gibson–Ashby closed-cell cellular solids theory to hexagonal blob assemblies in the Adaptive Matrix Ecosystem (AME), demonstrating a novel extension of Gibson–Ashby to engineering-scale, water-filled NRL\ structures with elastic inter-cell coupling. The Hex Structural Equivalence Analysis (sea), a computational tributary-cell model, is applied to a ten-level, thousand-blob pyramid. Interior blobs experience a…