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The fluid-structure interactions between flexible fibers and viscous flows play an essential role in various biological phenomena, medical problems, and industrial processes. Of particular interest is the case of particles freely…
Active networks made of biopolymers and motor proteins are valuable bioinspired systems that have been used in the last decades to study the cytoskeleton and its self-organization under mechanical stimulation. Different techniques are…
We investigate the dynamics of nanoscale droplets in the vicinity of chemical steps which separate parts of a substrate with different wettabilities. Due to long-ranged dispersion forces, nanodroplets positioned on one side of the step…
The shapes of liquid polystyrene (PS) droplets on viscoelastic polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrates are investigated experimentally using atomic force microscopy for a range of droplet sizes and substrate elasticities. These shapes, which…
Hypothesis: Surrounding fluids affect critically drop wetting dynamics in many applications involving viscous environments. Although macroscopic effects of outer fluid viscosity on contact line motion have been documented, the extent to…
The impact of complex media on the dynamics of active swimmers has gained a thriving interest in the research community for their prominent applications in various fields. This paper investigates the effect of viscoelasticity on the…
\textbf{Background} Hydrogels are crosslinked polymer networks that can absorb and retain a large fraction of liquid. Near a critical sliding velocity, hydrogels pressed against smooth surfaces exhibit time-dependent frictional behavior…
Water vapor condensation is common in nature and widely used in industrial applications, including water harvesting, power generation, and desalination. As compared to traditional filmwise condensation, dropwise condensation on…
The processing of thin-structured materials in a fluidic environment, from nearly inextensible but flexible graphene sheets to highly extensible polymer films, arises in many applications. So far, little is known about the dynamics of such…
We report on the capillary-induced snapping of elastic beams. We show that a millimeter-sized water drop gently deposited on a thin buckled polymer strip may trigger an elastocapillary snap-through instability. We investigate experimentally…
Elastomers filled with liquid inclusions -- as opposed to conventional solid fillers -- are a recent trend in the soft matter community because of their unique range of mechanical and physical properties. Such properties stem, in part, from…
From hydrogels and plastics to liquid crystals, soft solids cover a wide array of synthetic and biological materials that play key enabling roles in advanced technologies such as 3D printing, soft robotics, wearable electronics,…
The structural arrest of a polymeric suspension might be driven by an increase of the cross--linker concentration, that drives the gel transition, as well as by an increase of the polymer density, that induces a glass transition. These…
It is well-known that wettability exerts fundamental control over multiphase flow in porous media, which has been extensively studied in uniform-wet porous media. In contrast, multiphase flow in porous media with heterogeneous wettability…
Semiflexible polymers such as filamentous actin play a vital role in the mechanical behavior of cells, yet the basic properties of cross-linked F-actin networks remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we have performed numerical…
The impact of droplets on an inclined falling liquid film is studied experimentally using high-speed imaging. The falling film is created on a flat substrate with controllable thicknesses and flow rates. Droplets with different sizes and…
Switchable and adaptive substrates emerged as valuable tools for the control of wetting and actuation of droplet motion. Here we report a computational study of the dynamics of an unstable thin liquid film deposited on a switchable…
We investigate the collective dynamics of self-propelled droplets, confined in a one dimensional micro-fluidic channel. On one hand, neighboring droplets align and form large trains of droplets moving in the same direction. On the other…
A slender thread of elastic hydrogel is susceptible to a surface instability that is reminiscent of the classical Rayleigh-Plateau instability of liquid jets. The final, highly nonlinear states that are observed in experiments arise from a…
We investigate the mechanics of elastic fibres carrying liquid droplets. In such systems, buckling may localize inside the drop cavity if the fibre is thin enough. This so-called drop-on-coilable-fibre system exhibits a surprising…