Related papers: Elastocapillary deformations on partially-wetting …
Understanding and harnessing the coupling between lubrication pressure and elasticity provides materials design strategies for applications such as adhesives, coatings, microsensors, and biomaterials. Elastic deformation of compliant solids…
The surface tension of compliant materials such as gels provides resistance to deformation in addition to and sometimes surpassing that due to elasticity. This article studies how surface tension changes the contact mechanics of a small…
We consider the equilibrium of liquid droplets sitting on thin elastic sheets that are subject to a boundary tension and/or are clamped at their edge. We use scaling arguments, together with a detailed analysis based on the…
The elastic deformation of a soft solid induced by capillary forces crucially relies on the excess stress inside the solid-liquid interface. While for a liquid-liquid interface this "surface stress" is strictly identical to the "surface…
The capillary traction of a liquid contact line causes highly localized deformations in soft solids, tremendously slowing down wetting and dewetting dynamics by viscoelastic braking. Enforcing nonetheless large velocities leads to the…
The surface free energy, or surface tension, of a liquid interface gives rise to a pressure jump when the interface is curved. Here we show that a similar capillary pressure arises at the interface of soft solids. We present experimental…
Recent experiments have shown that surface stresses in soft materials can have a significant strain-dependence. Here we explore the implications of this surface elasticity to show how, and when, we expect it to arise. We develop the…
The wetting of soft elastic substrates exhibits many features that have no counterpart on rigid surfaces. Modelling the detailed elastocapillary interactions is challenging, and has so far been limited to single contact lines or single…
Surface stresses have recently emerged as a key player in the mechanics of highly compliant solids. The classic theories of contact mechanics describe adhesion with a compliant substrate as a competition between surface energies driving…
The dip-coating geometry, where a solid plate is withdrawn from or plunged into a liquid pool, offers a prototypical example of wetting flows involving contact-line motion. Such flows are commonly studied using the lubrication approximation…
The complicated dynamics of the contact line of a moving droplet on a solid substrate often hamper the efficient modeling of microfluidic systems. In particular, the selection of the effective boundary conditions, specifying the contact…
Surface tension is a prominent factor for the deformation of solids at micro-/nano-scale. This paper investigates the effects of surface tension on the two-dimensional contact problems of an elastic layer bonded to the rigid substrate.…
Based on the superposition of incremental frictional surface tractions that, in the case of an incompressible elastic half-space, correspond to a rigid tangential translation of a circular contact domain, the stress and displacement fields…
Electrowetting is a commonly used tool to manipulate sessile drops on hydrophobic surfaces. By applying an external voltage over a liquid and a dielectric-coated surface, one achieves a reduction of the macroscopic contact angles for…
Soft materials are known to deform due to a variety of mechanisms, including capillarity, buoyancy, and swelling. In this paper, we present experiments on polyvinylsiloxane gel threads partially-immersed in three liquids with different…
Flexible rings and rectangle structures floating at the surface of water are prone to deflect under the action of surface pressure induced by the addition of surfactant molecules on the bath. While the frames of rectangles bend inward or…
We consider some basic principles of fluid-induced lubrication at soft interfaces. In particular, we show how the presence of a soft substrate leads to an increase in the physical separation between surfaces sliding past each other. By…
Extremely compliant elastic materials, such as thin membranes or soft gels, can be deformed when wetted by a liquid drop. It is commonly assumed that the solid capillarity in "soft wetting" can be treated in the same manner as liquid…
This work proposes a novel model and numerical formulation for lubricated contact problems describing the mutual interaction between two deformable 3D solid bodies and an interposed fluid film. The solid bodies are consistently described…
Liquid drops slide more slowly over soft, deformable substrates than over rigid solids. This phenomenon can be attributed to the viscoelastic dissipation induced by the moving wetting ridge, which inhibits a rapid motion, and is called…