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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…
We introduce a novel apparatus designed for stress-controlled rheometers to perform simultaneous rheological and electrical measurements on strongly conductive complex fluids under shear. By means of a non-toxic liquid metal at room…
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…
We consider gelation of colloidal particles in suspension after cessation of shear flow. Particle aggregation is driven by a temperature-tunable attractive potential which controls the growth of clusters under isothermal conditions. A…
Polymer gels have been shown to behave as viscoelastic materials but only a small amount of data is usually provided in the glassy transition. In this paper, the dynamic moduli G' and G" of polyacrylamide hydrogels are investigated using…
We introduce a model gel system in which colloidal forces, structure, and rheology are measured by balancing the requirements of rheological and microscopy techniques with those of optical tweezers. Sterically stabilized poly(methyl…
From paints to food products, solvent evaporation is ubiquitous and critically impacts product rheological properties. It affects Newtonian fluids by concentrating any non-volatile components and viscoelastic materials, which hardens up. In…
We study a microscopically realistic model of a physical gel and use computer simulations to investigate its static and dynamic properties at thermal equilibrium. The phase diagram comprises a sol phase, a coexistence region ending at a…
We present a pedagogical review of the swelling thermodynamics and phase transitions of polymer gels. In particular, we discuss how features of the volume phase transition of the gel's osmotic equilibrium is analogous to other transitions…
When a swollen, thermoresponsive polymer gel is heated in a solvent bath, it expels solvent and deswells. When this heating is slow, deswelling proceeds homogeneously, as observed in a toroid-shaped gel that changes volume whilst…
It is established that the mechanical properties of hydrogels control the fate of (stem) cells. However, despite its importance, a one-to-one correspondence between gels' stiffness and cell behaviour is still missing from literature. In…
While undergoing gelation transition, a material passes through a distinctive state called the critical gel state. In the neighborhood of this critical gel state, how viscosity, equilibrium modulus, and relaxation times evolve are…
We use computer simulations to study the cooling rate dependence of the stability and energetics of model glasses created at constant pressure conditions and compare the results with glasses formed at constant volume conditions. To examine…
We numerically study a simple model for thermo-reversible colloidal gelation in which particles can form reversible bonds with a predefined maximum number of neighbors. We focus on three and four maximally coordinated particles, since in…
We conducted experiments to directionally freeze agar hydrogel drops with different polymer concentrations, on a copper substrate maintained at low temperature. Unlike the water droplet studied in the literature, where the liquid part can…
Thermoreversible sol-gel transitions in solutions of rod-like associating polymers are analyzed by computer simulations and by mean field models. The sol-gel transition is determined by the divergence of the cluster weight average. The…
We investigated the viscoelastic properties of colloid-polymer mixtures at intermediate colloid volume fraction and varying polymer concentrations, thereby tuning the attractive interactions. Within the examined range of polymer…
Understanding the concept of rheology in polymer melts with dissolved gases like CO2 is crucial in development of high quality polymer foams which are commonly manufactured by foam extrusion processes. The crystallization and rheological…
We study model near-critical polymer gelling systems made of gluten proteins dispersions stabilized at different distances from the gel point. We impose different shear rates and follow the time evolution of the stress. For sufficiently…
Thermoacoustic Refrigerators (TARs) use acoustic power to generate cold temperatures. Apart from the operating frequency and the mean temperature of the working medium, the charging pressure and the dynamic pressure in the TAR govern its…