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Understanding the influence of hydrodynamic stresses and colloidal interactions between droplets and membranes will inform better engineered membrane surfaces and process conditions. Using a long-wave hydrodynamic description that…
We investigate the dynamic behaviour of a two-dimensional (2D) droplet adhering to a wall in Poiseuille flow at low Reynolds numbers, in a system where either the droplet is viscoelastic (V/N) or the surrounding medium (N/V). The results…
Malleability of metals is an example of how dynamics of defects like dislocations induced by external stresses alters material properties and enables technological applications. However, these defects move merely to comply with the…
We use a custom shear cell coupled to an optical microscope to investigate at the particle level the yielding transition in concentrated emulsions subjected to an oscillatory shear deformation. By performing experiments lasting thousands of…
We investigate the evaporation of a two-dimensional droplet on a solid surface. The solid is flat but with smooth chemical variations that lead to a space-dependent local contact angle. We perform a detailed bifurcation analysis of the…
Microorganisms navigating through narrow spaces encounter significant hydrodynamic challenges. To overcome these constraints and sustain efficient motion, they employ adaptive strategies, including adaptive oscillatory body deformations.…
The flow of a liquid crystal around a particle does not only depend on its shape and the viscosity coefficients but also on the direction of the molecules. We studied the resulting drag force on a sphere moving in a nematic liquid crystal…
Dense suspensions of soft colloidal particles display a broad range of physical and rheological properties which are still far from being fully understood. To elucidate the role of deformability on colloidal flow, we employ computer…
Studies of sessile droplets and fluid bridges of a ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal in externally applied electric fields are presented. It is found that above a threshold, the interface of the fluid with air undergoes a fingering…
Droplets move on substrates with a spatio-temporal wettability pattern as generated, for example, on light-switchable surfaces. To study such cases, we implement the boundary-element method to solve the governing Stokes equations for the…
In liquid-crystalline elastomers, the nematic order parameter and the induced strain vary smoothly across the isotropic-nematic transition, without the expected first-order discontinuity. To investigate this smooth variation, we measure the…
We analyze the migration characteristics of a droplet in an oscillatory flow field in a parallel plate micro-confinement. Using phase filed formalism, we capture the dynamical evolution of the droplet over a wide range of the frequency of…
The equilibrium properties of polymer droplets on a soft deformable surface are investigated by molecular dynamics simulations of a bead-spring model. The surface consists of a polymer brush with irreversibly end-tethered linear homopolymer…
New experimental results and their physical analysis are presented to clarify the behavior of a relatively stable self-arranged droplet cluster levitating over the locally heated water surface. An external electric field of both opposite…
Active fluid droplets are a class of soft materials exhibiting autonomous motion sustained by an energy supply. Such systems have been shown to capture motility regimes typical of biological cells and are ideal candidates as building-block…
Drop deformation in uniform electric fields is a classic problem. The pioneering work of G.I.Taylor demonstrated that for weakly conducting media, the drop fluid undergoes a toroidal flow and the drop adopts a prolate or oblate spheroidal…
We investigate pump-driven droplet electrohydrodynamics with an emphasis on deformation, pinch-off, and recoalescence. A thermodynamically consistent phase-field framework is developed that couples Nernst--Planck--Poisson electrodiffusion…
A classic result due to G.I.Taylor is that a drop placed in a uniform electric field becomes a prolate or oblate spheroid, which is axisymmetrically aligned with the applied field. We report an instability and symmetry-breaking transition…
We report on a switchable emulsion droplet microswimmer by utilizing a temperature-dependent transition of the droplet phase. The droplets, made from a liquid crystalline (LC) smectic phase material ($T =$ 25 $^{\circ}$C), self-propel only…
Charged colloidal crystals exhibit a subtle interplay between electrostatic screening and elastic deformation. In an anisotropic elastic medium the coupling between dilation and the local ionic environment becomes direction dependent,…