Related papers: Capillary micromechanics: Measuring the elasticity…
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…
When a suspension dries, the suspending fluid evaporates, leaving behind a dry film composed of the suspended particles. During the final stages of drying, the height of the fluid film on the substrate drops below the particle size,…
We describe a high-resolution, high-bandwidth technique for determining the local viscoelasticity of soft materials such as polymer gels. Loss and storage shear moduli are determined from the power spectra of thermal fluctuations of…
We use optical trapping to continuously bend an isolated microtubule while simultaneously measuring the applied force and the resulting filament strain, thus allowing us to determine its elastic properties over a wide range of applied…
Cells and other soft particles are often forced to flow in confined geometries in both laboratory and natural environments, where the elastic deformation induces an additional drag and pressure drop across the particle. In contrast with…
A liquid surface touching a solid usually deforms in a near-wall meniscus region. In this work, we replace part of the free surface with a soft polymer and examine the shape of this elasto-capillary meniscus, result of the interplay between…
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…
Isolated microscopic magnetic particles are used to induce local perturbations in dense colloidal suspensions by rotating an external magnet. Confocal microscopy enables tracking of both the magnetic probe particle and adjacent colloidal…
We study the interaction between capillary forces and deformation in the context of a deformable capillary adhesive: a clamped, tense membrane is adhered to a rigid substrate by the surface tension of a liquid droplet. We find that the…
Soft particles can be better emulsifiers than hard particles because they stretch at fluid interfaces. This deformation can increase adsorption energies by orders of magnitude relative to rigid particles. The deformation of a particle at an…
Compression experiments are widely used to study the mechanical properties of materials at micro- and nanoscale. However, the conventional engineering stress measurement method used in these experiments neglects to account for the…
Precise measuring the deforming force and observation of the deformation dynamics along with difficulties of micro sample preparation are the main problems which make the micro-scale experiments difficult. Here we present a method for…
Recent advances in computational glass physics enable the study of computer glasses featuring a very wide range of mechanical and kinetic stabilities. The current literature, however, lacks a comprehensive data set against which different…
Microfluidic channels have emerged as useful tools to control dynamic forcing on transported microscale objects, as encountered in emulsions, biological flows, and other soft matter systems. Tailored channel designs enable precise…
Soft particles display highly versatile properties with respect to hard colloids, even more so at fluid-fluid interfaces. In particular, microgels, consisting of a cross-linked polymer network, are able to deform and flatten upon adsorption…
The usefulness of glasses, and particularly of metallic glasses, in technological applications is often limited by their toughness, which is defined as the area under the stress vs. strain curve before plastic yielding. Recently toughness…
Recent progress in approaches to determine the elastic constants of solids starting from the microscopic particle interactions is reviewed. On the theoretical side, density functional theory approaches are discussed and compared to more…
The mechanical properties of a disordered heterogeneous medium depend, in general, on a complex interplay between multiple length scales. Connecting local interactions to macroscopic observables, such as stiffness or fracture, is thus…
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…
The elastic properties of granular hydrogels are commonly characterised under wet conditions, yet the influence of capillary interactions remains unclear. In practical applications, hydrogels operate in aqueous environments containing…