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Colloidal gels, where nanoscale particles aggregate into an elastic yet fragile network, are at the heart of materials that combine specific optical, electrical and mechanical properties. Tailoring the viscoelastic features of colloidal…
Microgels are soft colloids that, in virtue of their polymeric nature, can react to external stimuli such as temperature or pH by changing their size. The resulting swelling/deswelling transition can be exploited in fundamental research as…
Living organisms have mastered the dynamic control of internal stresses to perform an array of functions, such as change shape and locomote. State-of-the-art attempts to replicate this ability in synthetic materials are rudimentary in…
Encapsulation of chemicals using polymer membranes enables to control their transport and delivery for applications such as agrochemistry or detergency. To rationalize the design of polymer capsules, it is necessary to understand how the…
Dielectric elastomers (DEs) are a type of multifunctional materials with salient features that are very attractive in developing soft, lightweight, and small-scale transducers and robotics. This paper reviews the mechanics of soft DE…
We study the thermodynamics of binary mixtures with the volume fraction of the minority component less than the amount required to form a flat interface and show that the surface tension dominated equilibrium phase of the mixture forms a…
We report, for the first time, some experimental observations regarding a new type of long range interaction between rigid particles that prevails when they are suspended in an soft elastic gel. A denser particle submerges itself to a…
Large deformations of soft elastic beads spinning at high angular velocity in a denser background fluid are investigated theoretically, numerically, and experimentally using millimeter-size polyacrylamide hydrogel particles introduced in a…
Colloidal gels are widely applied in industry due to their rheological character -- no flow takes place below the yield stress. Such property enables gels to maintain uniform distribution in practical formulations; otherwise, solid…
In this paper I present a simple and self-consistent framework based on microrheology that allows one to obtain the mechanical response of viscoelastic fluids and gels from the motion of probe particles immersed on it. By considering a…
We introduce a novel apparatus designed for stress-controlled rheometers to perform simultaneous rheological and electrical measurements on strongly conductive complex fluids under shear. By means of a non-toxic liquid metal at room…
Plasticized poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) is a jelly-like soft dielectric material that attracted substantial interest recently as a new type of electro-active polymers. Under electric fields of several hundred Volt/mm, PVC gels undergo large…
We measure Young's modulus of a free polyelectrolyte multilayer film by studying osmotically induced swelling of polyelectrolyte multilayer microcapsules filled with the polyelectrolyte solution. Different filling techniques and core…
The wearable EEG device sector is advancing rapidly, enabling fast and reliable detection of brain activity for investigating brain function and pathology. However, many current EEG systems remain challenging for users with neurological…
Colloidal magnetic particles embedded in an elastic polymer matrix constitute a smart material called ferrogel. It responds to an applied external magnetic field by changes in elastic properties, which can be exploited for various…
The equilibrium properties of ionic microgels are investigated using a combination of the Poisson-Boltzmann and Flory theories. Swelling behavior, density profiles, and effective charges are all calculated in a self-consistent way. Special…
Predicting the mechanical response of the soft gel materials under external deformation is of paramount importance in many areas, such as foods, pharmaceuticals, solid-liquid separations, cosmetics, aerogels and drug delivery. Most of the…
This paper presents an integrated multiphysics simulation approach of piezoelectric micropumps. Micropumps and micro blowers are essential devices in various cutting-edge industries like laboratory equipment, medical devices, and fuel…
The widespread popularity of smart meters enables an immense amount of fine-grained electricity consumption data to be collected. Meanwhile, the deregulation of the power industry, particularly on the delivery side, has continuously been…
Many suspensions contain particles with complex shapes that are affected not only by hydrodynamics, but also by thermal fluctuations, internal kinematic constraints and other long-range non-hydrodynamic interactions. Modeling these systems…