Related papers: Syneresis and delayed detachment in agar plates
Hydrogels behave as viscoelastic soft solids and display a porous microstructure filled with water with typical amounts of 90\%~w/w or more. As such, these materials are highly sensitive to water loss through evaporation, which impacts…
Porous gels -- gels with solvent-filled pores that are much larger than their mesh size -- are widely used in engineering and biomedical applications due to their tunable mechanics, high water content, and selective permeability. Among…
Thermoreversible hydrogels are commonly prepared by cooling down to ambient temperature, aqueous polymer solutions first brought to a boil. The incubation time of the polymer solution at such a high temperature is traditionally kept to a…
Solution self-assembly of amphiphilic block copolymers (BCs) is typically performed by a solvent-to-water exchange. However, BC assemblies are often trapped in metastable states depending on the mixing conditions such as the magnitude and…
When sheared, most elastic solids such as metals, rubbers and polymer hydrogels dilate in the direction perpendicular to the shear plane. This well-known behaviour known as the Poynting effect is characterized by a positive normal stress.…
A time-resolved experimental study on the kinetics and relaxation of the structural formation process in gelling Agar-water solutions was carried out using our custom-built torsion resonator. The study was based on measurements of three…
Biofilms, bacteria cells surrounded by a self-produced polymeric matrix, are common on medical devices and lead to many hospital infections. The biofilm lifecycle includes disassembly and dispersion, where bacteria clusters detach from the…
Using agar plates hosting a 2D cell population stimulated with signaling molecules is crucial for experiments such as gene regulation and drug discovery in a wide range of biological studies. In this paper, a biophysical model is proposed…
Glasses and gels, widely encountered amorphous solids with diverse industrial and everyday applications, share intriguing similarities such as rigidity without crystalline order and dynamic slowing down during aging. However, the underlying…
Acid-induced release of stored ions from polyacrylic acid hydrogels (with a free surface fully permeable to the ion and acid flux) was observed to increase the gel osmotic pressure that leads to rapid, temporary swelling faster than the…
We present an extensive experimental study of mode-I, steady, slow crack dynamics in gelatin gels. Taking advantage of the sensitivity of the elastic stiffness to gel composition and history we confirm and extend the model for fracture of…
Recent experiments on crosslinked gels quenched from solvent-rich to solvent-poor conditions show solvent-rich domains embedded in a gel-rich matrix. These domains coarsen and then undergo kinetic arrest at micron scales for hours, before…
We characterize the mechanical recovery of compliant silicone gels following adhesive contact failure. We establish broad, stable adhesive contacts between rigid microspheres and soft gels, then stretch the gels to large deformations by…
We investigate by time-resolved Synchrotron ultra-small X-ray scattering the dynamics of liquid-liquid phase-separation (LLPS) of gluten protein suspensions following a temperature quench. Samples at a fixed concentration (237 mg/ml) but…
We investigate the delayed rupture of biopolymer gels under a constant shear load by simultaneous dynamic light scattering and rheology measurements. We unveil the crucial role of normal stresses built up during gelation: all samples that…
Nanostructured materials formed via kinetically controlled self-assembly processes gather more interest nowadays. Bicontinuous emulsion gels stabilized by colloidal particles, called bijels, are attractive materials in soft-matter as they…
The contact of a hydrogel during the rotational shearing on glass surface in concentrated polymer solution was observed in situ. Dynamic contact patterns that rotate in-phase with the rotational shearing of the gel were observed for the…
Various studies have shown that food structure has an impact on digestion kinetics. We focus here on the effects of gastric and intestinal enzymes (in-vitro digestion) on two canola seed storage proteins, napin and cruciferin. To monitor…
Hydrogel consists of a crosslinked polymer matrix imbibed with a solvent such as water at volume fractions that can exceed 90\%. They are important in many scientific and engineering applications due to their tunable physiochemical…
Biomolecular condensates are cellular phase-separated droplets that usually exhibit a viscoelastic mechanical response. A behavior rationalized by modeling the complex molecules that make up a condensate as stickers and spacers, which…