Related papers: Nematic droplets at fibres
We study the effects of nozzle geometry on the dynamics of thin fluid films flowing down a vertical cylindrical fibre. Recent experiments show that varying the nozzle diameter can lead to different flow regimes and droplet characteristics…
Over the past decade the study of fluidic droplets bouncing and skipping (or ``walking'') on a vibrating fluid bath has gone from an interesting experiment to a vibrant research field. The field exhibits challenging fluids problems,…
We derive a multiphysics model that accounts for network elasticity with spontaneous strains, swelling and nematic interactions in liquid crystal gels (LCGs). We discuss the coupling among the various physical mechanisms, with particular…
We investigate the energetics of droplets sourced by the thermal fluctuations in a system undergoing a first-order transition. In particular, we confine our studies to two dimensions with explicit calulations in the plane and on the sphere.…
For isotropic fluids, classical nucleation theory predicts the nucleation rate, barrier height and critical droplet size by accounting for the competition between bulk energy and interfacial tension. The nucleation process in liquid…
We examine theoretically the effects of random topographical substrates on the motion of two-dimensional droplets via appropriate statistical approaches. Different random substrate families are represented as stationary random functions.…
The dynamics of active smectic liquid crystals confined on a spherical surface is explored through an active phase field crystal model. Starting from an initially randomly perturbed isotropic phase, several types of topological defects are…
In a recent paper, we analyzed the properties of a new kind of spherical wavelets (called needlets) for statistical inference procedures on spherical random fields; the investigation was mainly motivated by applications to cosmological…
We study the snapping instability of a spherical elastic shell induced by a viscous flow, the umbrella flipping problem when life is at low Reynolds numbers. We combine precision desktop-scale experiments, fluid-structure simulations, shell…
A systematic analysis of defect textures in facetted nanoparticles with polygonal configurations embedded in a nematic matrix is performed using the Landau-de Gennes model, homeotropic strong anchoring in a square domain with uniform…
Mirroring their role in electrical and optical physics, two-dimensional crystals are emerging as novel platforms for fluid separations and water desalination, which are hydrodynamic processes that occur in nanoscale environments. For…
Control of physical behaviors of nematic colloids and colloidal crystals has been demonstrated by tuning particle shape, topology, chirality and surface charging. However, the capability of altering physical behaviors of such soft matter…
The newly-discovered ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal exhibits a variety of unique defect phenomena. The depolarization field in the material favors spontaneous spatial variations in polarization, manifesting in diverse forms such as…
Fr\'eedericksz transitions in nematic liquid crystals are re-examined with a focus on differences between systems with magnetic fields and those with electric fields. A magnetic field can be treated as uniform in a liquid-crystal medium;…
We introduce a new class of non-isothermal models describing the evolution of nematic liquid crystals and prove their consistency with the fundamental laws of classical Thermodynamics. The resulting system of equations captures all…
A theoretical analysis of homeotropic alignment induced by nanoparticles (NPs) in a nematic liquid crystal (NLC) sample cell is presented. It is found that such alignment on the surface of a NP causes a change in the orientation of the…
We show that back-flow, the coupling between the order parameter and the velocity fields, has a significant effect on the motion of defects in nematic liquid crystals. In particular the defect speed can depend strongly on the topological…
We investigate here a generalized construction of spherical wavelets/needlets which admits extra-flexibility in the harmonic domain, i.e., it allows the corresponding support in multipole (frequency) space to vary in more general forms than…
We present in this Letter a free-energy approach to the dynamics of a fluid near a nanostructured surface. The model accounts both for the static phase equilibrium in the vicinity of the surface (wetting angles, Cassie-Wenzel transition)…
Non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) simulations of fluid flow have highlighted the peculiarities of nanoscale flows compared to classical fluid mechanics; in particular, boundary conditions can deviate from the no-slip behavior at…