Related papers: When are rough surfaces sticky?
Any solid surface is intrinsically rough on the microscopic scale. In this paper, we study the effect of this roughness on the wetting properties of hydrophilic substrates. Macroscopic arguments, such as those leading to the well-known…
In this work, we perform a systematic computer simulation study of ice premelting, and explore the thickness and structure of quasi-liquid layers formed at the interface of ice with substrates of different hydrophilicity. Our study shows…
A deterministic theory describing the melting of an ultrathin lubricant film between two atomically smooth solid surfaces has been developed. The lubricant state is described by introducing a parameter of excess volume that arises owing to…
In order to characterize very weak adhesive surfaces, we have developed a quantitative test inspired by the Johnson, Kendall, and Roberts adhesion test for soft adhesives, which relies on the formation and then the rupture of a capillary…
We study the fluid-mediated approach of a deformable axisymmetric object towards a rigid substrate, focusing on how its shape influences contact formation. For low approach velocities and large Stokes numbers, we show that sharper profiles…
The dynamic of contact formation between soft materials immersed in a fluid is accompanied by fluid drainage and elastic deformation. As a result, controlling the coupling between lubrication pressure and elasticity provides strategies to…
Data from an instrument that measures conductance, stiffness and rupture strength of junctions indicates that when two macroscopic metal surfaces are brought into contact a nanometer size junction spontaneously forms over a long time scale…
The shear strength of cohesionless granular materials is generally attributed to the compactness or anisotropy of their microstructure. An open issue is how such compact or anisotropic microstructures, and thus the shear strength, depend on…
Granular materials are involved in most industrial and environmental processes, as well as many civil engineering applications. Although significant advances have been made in understanding the statics and dynamics of cohesionless grains…
We report on self-assembly, clustering, and conformational phases of peptides on inorganic semiconductor surfaces. The peptide-covered surface fraction can differ by a factor of 25, depending mainly on surface and peptide polarity. Low…
Experiments on magnetic nanoparticles in a viscous medium have shown that agglomerates form that display complex shapes. However, most theoretical results predict more simple, ordered shapes, such as single-particle width chains. To account…
The measurement of real contact area between rough surfaces is one of most challenge problems in contact mechanics and is of importance to understand some physical mechanisms in tribology. Based on the frustrated total internal reflection,…
The superiority of many natural surfaces at resisting soft, sticky biofoulants has inspired the integration of dynamic topography with mechanical instability to promote self-cleaning artificial surfaces. The physics behind this novel…
The detachment of material in an adhesive wear process is driven by a fracture mechanism which is controlled by a critical length-scale. Previous efforts in multi-asperity wear modeling have applied this microscopic process to rough elastic…
Normal contact behaviour between non adhesive fractal rough particles is studied using a finite element method (FEM). A series of spherical grain surfaces with distinguished roughness features are generated by means of Spherical Harmonics.…
Wrinkling patterns at the metallized surface of thin polymer films are shown to be sensitive to the sticky or slippery character of the polymer/substrate interface (titanium coating, polystyrene film and coated silicon substrate). Selective…
Adhesion is a fundamental phenomenon that plays a role in many engineering and biological applications. This paper concerns the use of machine learning to characterize the effective adhesive properties when a thin film is peeled from a…
We study the time dependency of the (average) interfacial separation between an elastic solid with a flat surface and a rigid solid with a randomly rough surface, squeezed together in a fluid. We use an analytical theory describing the…
This paper studies the lubricating properties of graphene on randomly rough Au surfaces in sliding nanofriction using molecular dynamics. It is shown that the friction and the consequent heat dissipation decrease more than an order of…
Surface tension tends to minimize the area of interfaces between pieces of matter in different thermodynamic phases, be they in the solid or the liquid state. This can be relevant for the macroscopic shape of very soft solids, and lead to a…