Related papers: Wetting of cholesteric liquid crystals
Chirality, ubiquitous in complex biological systems, can be controlled and quantified in synthetic materials such as cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) systems. In this work, we study spherical shells of CLC under weak anchoring conditions.…
The hydrodynamic stresses created by active particles can destabilise orientational order present in the system. This is manifested, for example, by the appearance of a bend instability in active nematics or in quasi-2-dimensional living…
We study the lubrication of fluid-immersed soft interfaces and show that elastic deformation couples tangential and normal forces and thus generates lift. We consider materials that deform easily, due to either geometry (e.g. a shell) or…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
We model within the framework of finite elasticity two inherent instabilities observed in liquid crystal elastomers under uniaxial tension. First is necking which occurs when a material sample suddenly elongates more in a small region where…
Surface properties of mixtures of charged platelike colloids and salt in contact with a charged planar wall are studied within density functional theory. The particles are modeled by hard cuboids with their edges constrained to be parallel…
Blue phases of cholesteric liquid crystals offer a spectacular example of naturally occurring disclination line networks. Here we numerically solve the hydrodynamic equations of motion to investigate the response of three types of blue…
We investigate shear strength properties of wet granular materials in the pendular state (i.e. the state where the liquid phase is discontinuous) as a function of water content. Sand and glass beads were wetted and tested in a direct shear…
Polymeric particles are strong candidates for designing artificial materials capable of emulating the complex twisting-based functionality observed in biological systems. In this letter, we provide the first detailed investigation of the…
The phase behavior of colloidal particles embedded in a binary fluid is influenced by wetting layers surrounding each particle. The free energy of the fluid film depends on its morphology, i.e., on size, shape and connectivity. Under rather…
Cholesteric elastomers possess a macroscopic ``phase chirality'' as the director n rotates in a helical fashion along an optical axis $z$ and can be described by a chiral order parameter. This parameter can be tuned by changing the helix…
In complex crystals close to melting or at finite temperatures, different types of defects are ubiquitous and their role becomes relevant in the mechanical response of these solids. Conventional elasticity theory fails to provide a…
We study the equilibrium properties and the wetting behavior of a simple liquid on a polymer brush, with and without presence of lubricant by multibody Dissipative Particle Dynamics simulations. The lubricant is modelled as a polymeric…
It is known from both experiments and molecular dynamics simulations that chemically patterning a solid surface has an effect on the flow of an adjacent liquid. This fact is in stark contrast with predictions of classical fluid mechanics…
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…
Soft particles suspended in fluids flowing through microchannels are often encountered in biological flows such as cells in vessels. They can deform under flow or when subject to mechanical stresses as they interact with themselves.…
Through Monte Carlo simulations and the Associating Lattice Gas Model, the phases of a two-dimensional fluid under hydrophilic confinement are evaluated. The model, in its unconfined version, reproduces the anomalous behavior of water…
The ability to control wettability is important for a wide range of technological applications in which precise microfluidic handling is required. It is known that predesigned roughness at a micro- or nano- scale enhances the wetting…
We investigate theoretically the morphology of a thin nematic film adsorbed at flat substrate patterned by stripes with alternating aligning properties, normal and tangential respectively. We construct a simple "exactly-solvable" effective…
We consider a mathematical model that describes the flow of a Nematic Liquid Crystal (NLC) film placed on a flat substrate, across which a spatially-varying electric potential is applied. Due to their polar nature, NLC molecules interact…