Related papers: Rheology, Structure and Dynamics of Colloid-Polyme…
Multi-phase flows encountered in nature or in industry, exhibit non trivial rheological properties, that can be understood better thanks to model materials and appropriate rheometers. Here, we use model unsaturated granular materials:…
Poly-vinlyacetate (PVAc) forms very stable and reproducible monolayers on the surface of water, a model system to understand polymer physics on two dimensions. A recently introduced technique is applied here to to study viscoelasticity of…
Magnetic nanoparticles in a colloidal solution self-assemble in various aligned structures, which has a profound influence on the flow behavior. However, the precise role of the microstructure in the development of the rheological response…
Colloidal rods immersed in a thermotropic liquid-crystalline solvent are at the basis of so-called hybrid liquid crystals which are characterized by tunable nematic fluidity with symmetries ranging from conventional uniaxial nematic or…
We study a chemical gelation model in two dimensions which includes both monomer aggregations and bond fluctuations. Our numerical simulation shows that a sol-gel transition occurs when an initial monomer concentration is above a critical…
Several surfactant molecules self-assemble in solution to form long, flexible wormlike micelles which get entangled with each other, leading to viscoelastic gel phases. We discuss our recent work on the rheology of such a gel formed in the…
Natural and synthetic multi-component gels display emergent properties, which implies that they are more than just the sum of their components. This warrants the investigation of the role played by inter-species interactions in shaping gel…
Folded protein hydrogels are prime candidates as tuneable biomaterials but it is unclear to what extent their mechanical properties have mesoscopic, as opposed to molecular origins. To address this, we probe hydrogels of the muscle-derived…
We investigate with numerical simulations the influence of topology and stiffness on macroscopic rheological properties of polymer melts consisting of unknotted, knotted or concatenated rings. While melts of flexible, knotted oligomer rings…
Rotating particles moving in fluids undergo a transverse migration via the inertia-induced Magnus effect. This phenomenon vanishes at colloidal scales because inertia is negligible and the fluid flow is time reversible. Yet, recent…
We probe the mechanisms at work in the build-up of thermoreversible gel networks, with the help of hybrid gelatin gels containing a controlled density of irreversible, covalent crosslinks (CL), which we quench below the physical gelation…
We investigate the response to temperature of a well-known colloid-polymer mixture. At room temperature, the critical value of the second virial coefficient of the effective interaction for the Asakura-Oosawa model predicts the onset of…
The mesoscale rheology of a lamellar phase of a block copolymer is modeled as a structured fluid of uniaxial symmetry. The model predicts a viscoelastic response that depends on the angle between the the local lamellar planes and velocity…
Droplet coalescence is ubiquitous in nature and the same time key to various technologies, such as inkjet printing. Here, we report on the coalescence of polymer droplets with different chain lengths coalescing on substrates of different…
We introduce an exactly solvable statistical-mechanical model of the hydration of non-polar compounds, based on grouping water molecules in clusters where hydrogen bonds and isotropic interactions occur; interactions between clusters are…
Colloidal gels are formed through the aggregation of attractive particles, whose size ranges from 10~nm to a few micrometers, suspended in a liquid. Such gels are ubiquitous in everyday life applications, from food products to paints or…
We investigate dynamical heterogeneities in the collective relaxation of a concentrated microgel system, for which the packing fraction can be conveniently varied by changing the temperature. The packing fraction dependent mechanical…
The dynamic properties of a model transient network have been studied by dynamic light scattering. The network is formed by microemulsion droplets linked by telechelic polymers (modified hydrophilic polymers with two grafted hydrophobic…
Mode-coupling theory (MCT) predicts arrest of colloids in terms of their volume fraction, and the range and depth of the interparticle attraction. We discuss how effective values of these parameters evolve under cluster aggregation. We…
Bulk rheological properties of viscoelastic fluids have been extensively studied in macroscopic shearing geometries. However, little is known when an active microscopic probe is used to locally perturb them far from the linear-response…