Elastocapillary bending of microfibers around liquid droplets
Soft Condensed Matter
2017-02-22 v1
Abstract
We report on the elastocapillary deformation of flexible microfibers in contact with liquid droplets. A fiber is observed to bend more as the size of the contacting droplet is increased. At a critical droplet size, proportional to the bending elastocapillary length, the fiber is seen to spontaneously wind around the droplet. To rationalize these observations, we invoke a minimal model based on elastic beam theory, and find agreement with experimental data. Further energetic considerations provide a consistent prediction for the winding criterion.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1607.05990,
title = {Elastocapillary bending of microfibers around liquid droplets},
author = {Rafael D. Schulman and Amir Porat and Kathleen Charlesworth and Adam Fortais and Thomas Salez and Elie Raphaël and Kari Dalnoki-Veress},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.05990},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
9 pages, 8 figures