Related papers: Suction effects in deep Boom clay block samples
We present experimental results for the dependency of the pull-off time (failure time) on the pull-off force for suction cups in the air and in water. The results are analyzed using a theory we have developed for the contact between suction…
Solids deform and fluids flow, but soft glassy materials, such as emulsions, foams, suspensions, and pastes, exhibit an intricate mix of solid and liquid-like behavior. While much progress has been made to understand their elastic (small…
A phase transformation in a metastable phase can be affected when it is subjected to a high intensity ultrasound wave. In this study we determined the effect of oscillation in pressure and temperature on a phase transformation using the…
Motivated by recent experimental studies of rheological hysteresis in soft glassy materials, we study numerically strain rate sweeps in simple yield stress fluids and viscosity bifurcating yield stress fluids. Our simulations of downward…
Polymer flooding is crucial in hydrocarbon production, increasing oil recovery by improving the water-oil mobility ratio. However, the high viscosity of displacing fluid may cause problems with sand production on poorly consolidated…
Gels are used to design bilayered structures with high residual stresses. The swelling of a thin layer on a compliant substrate leads to compressive stresses. The post-buckling of this layer is investigated experimentally; the wavelengths…
We study how crack buckling affects stress and strain in a thin sheet with random disorder. The sheet is modeled as an elastic lattice of beams where each of the beams have individual thresholds for breaking. A statistical distribution with…
We report on a comparison between stress relaxations after an applied step strain and stress relaxations during slow, continuous strain in a bubble raft. A bubble raft serves as a model two-dimensional foam and consists of a single layer of…
We study experimentally and theoretically the sedimentation of gels made of strongly aggregated colloidal particles, focussing on the long time behavior, when mechanical equilibrium is asymptotically reached. The asymptotic gel height is…
Failure and fault slip in crystalline rocks is associated with dilation. When pore fluids are present and drainage is insufficient, dilation leads to pore pressure drops, which in turn lead to strengthening of the material. We conducted…
We measured the vertical pressure response function of a layer of sand submitted to a localized normal force at its surface. We found that this response profile depends on the way the layer has been prepared: all profiles show a single…
We study strain-controlled plastic deformation of crystalline solids via two-dimensional discrete dislocation dynamics simulations. To this end, we characterize the average stress-strain curves as well as the statistical properties of…
Subjected to compressive stresses, soft polymers with stiffness gradients can display various buckling patterns. These compressive stresses can have different origins, like mechanical forces, temperature changes, or, for hydrogel materials,…
The formation of drops of a complex fluid, for instance including dissolved polymers and/or solid particles, has practical implications in several industrial and biophysical processes. In this Letter, we experimentally investigate the…
Suction cups are widely used in applications such as in measurement of mechanical properties of skin in vivo, in drug delivery devices or in acupuncture treatment. Understanding the mechanical response of skin under hypobaric pressure are…
We use computer simulations to study the relaxation of strongly deformed highly entangled polymer melts in the non-linear viscoelastic regime, focusing on anisotropic chain conformations after isochoric elongation. The Doi-Edwards tube…
In a recent feature article in this journal, co-authored by Gert van der Heijden, I described the static-dynamic analogy and its role in understanding the localized post-buckling of shell-like structures, looking exclusively at integrable…
The dewetting of thin nanofilms is significantly impacted by thermal fluctuations, liquid-solid slip, and disjoining pressure, which can be described by lubrication equations augmented by appropriately scaled noise terms, known as…
Using the Taylor--Couette geometry we experimentally investigate the effect of salt on drag reduction caused by bubbles present in the flow. We combine torque measurements with optical high-speed imaging to relate the bubble size to the…
Forced detachment of a single polymer chain, strongly-adsorbed on a solid substrate, is investigated by two complementary methods: a coarse-grained analytical dynamical model, based on the Onsager stochastic equation, and Molecular Dynamics…