Related papers: Permeability of mixed soft and hard granular mater…
This Letter introduces unexpected diffusion properties in dense granular flows, and shows that they result from the development of partially jammed clusters of grains, or granular vortices. Transverse diffusion coefficients $D$ and average…
When a soft hydrogel sphere is placed on a rigid hydrophilic substrate, it undergoes arrested spreading by forming an axisymmetric foot near the contact line, while conserving its global spherical shape. In contrast, liquid water (that…
This study investigates the coupled deformation and flow behavior of thin, hyper-elastic, porous membranes subjected to pressure loading. Using bulge test experiments, optical deformation measurements, and flow rate characterization, we…
We find that a column of glass beads exhibits a well-defined transition between two phases that differ in their resistance to shear. Pulses of fluidization are used to prepare static states with well-defined particle volume fractions $\phi$…
We study the structure and the dynamics in the formation of irreversible gels by means of molecular dynamics simulation of a model system where the gelation transition is due to the random percolation of permanent bonds between neighboring…
The synergetic approach proposed here is based on characteristic instability of chemical bonding in the form of the bond wave considered as the spatiotemporal correlation between the elementary acts of bond exchange. In frames of the model,…
From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…
When strained beyond the linear regime, soft colloidal glasses yield to steady-state plastic flow in a way that is similar to the deformation of conventional amorphous solids. Due to the much larger size of the colloidal particles with…
Wettability is the affinity of a liquid for a solid surface. For energetic reasons, macroscopic drops of liquid are nearly spherical away from interfaces with solids, and any local deformations due to molecular-scale surface interactions…
Gelatin is often used as an analog for studying soft and biological materials in order to understand the mechanics of behavior of biological tissue in events like traumatic brain injuries. The material properties of gelatin change with the…
The properties of liquid dispersions, such as foams or emulsions, depend strongly on the volume fraction $\phi$ of the continuous phase. Concentrating on the example of foams, we show experimentally and theoretically that $\phi$ may be…
The swelling dynamics of polymer gels are characterized by the (collective) diffusion coefficient $D$ of the polymer network. Here, we measure the temperature dependence of $D$ of polymer gels with controlled homogeneous network structures…
Two-dimensional Particle Tracking Velocimetry (PTV) is a promising technique to study the behaviour of granular flows. The aim is to experimentally determine the free surface width and position of the shear band from the velocity profile to…
In this article, we study the spreading of droplets of density-matched granular suspensions on the surface of a solid. Bidispersity of the particle size distribution enriches the conclusions drawn from monodisperse experiments by…
We consider the link between fragility and elasticity that follows from analysis of the data for a set of soft-colloid materials consisting of deformable spheres reported by Mattsson et. al., in Nature vol 462, 83 (2009). Fragility index…
The plastic flow of a foam results from bubble rearrangements. We study their occurrence in experiments where a foam is forced to flow in 2D: around an obstacle; through a narrow hole; or sheared between rotating disks. We describe their…
In this paper we study the mechanical properties and pore structure in a three-dimensional molecular dynamics model of porous glass under athermal quasistatic shear. The vitreous samples are prepared by rapid thermal quench from a high…
The elastic coupling between plastic events is generally invoked to interpret plastic properties and failure of amorphous soft glassy materials. We report an experiment where the emergence of a self-organized plastic flow is observed well…
There is growing evidence that the flow of driven amorphous solids is not homogeneous, even if the macroscopic stress is constant across the system. Via event driven molecular dynamics simulations of a hard sphere glass, we provide the…
Small angle neutron and x-ray scattering methods are used to investigate the structure of dilute suspensions of two different ferrofluid systems dispersed in soft polyacrylamide hydrogels. It is found that the particles in the fluid are…