Related papers: Structure Formation in Soft Matter Solutions Induc…
Entropic forces in colloidal suspensions and in polymer-colloid systems are of long-standing and continuing interest. Experiments show how entropic forces can be used to control the self-assembly of colloidal particles. Significant advances…
Evaporation alters the molecular interactions and leads to phase separation within the evaporating liquid. The question of whether evaporation could lead to specific phase separation at the liquid interface and eventually to the formation…
We describe several unexpected phenomena, caused by a solid-solid phase transition (gel-to-crystal) typical for all main classes of lipid substances - phospholipids, triglycerides, diglycerides, alkanes, etc. We discovered that this…
Lubrication flows appear in many applications in engineering, biophysics, and in nature. Separation of surfaces and minimisation of friction and wear is achieved when the lubrication fluid builds up a lift force. In this paper we analyse…
Salt water is ubiquitous, playing crucial roles in geological and physiological processes. Despite centuries of investigations, whether or not water's structure is drastically changed by dissolved ions is still debated. Based on density…
Liquid migration in active soft solids is a very common phenomenon in Nature at different scales: from cells to leaves. It can be caused by mechanical as well as chemical actions. The work focuses on the migration of liquid provoked by…
The hydrophobic effect is the dominant force which drives a protein towards its native state, but its physics has not been thoroughly understood yet. We introduce an exactly solvable model of the solvation of non-polar molecules in water,…
Drying suspensions often leave behind complex patterns of particulates, as might be seen in the coffee stains on a table. Here we consider the dynamics of periodic band or uniform solid film formation on a vertical plate suspended partially…
Evaporating salty droplets are ubiquitous in nature, in our home and in the laboratory. Interestingly, the transport processes in such apparently simple systems differ strongly from evaporating "freshwater" droplets since convection is…
In particle-laden flows through porous media, porosity and permeability are significantly affected by the deposition and erosion of particles. Experiments show that the permeability evolution of a porous medium with respect to a particle…
Unstable systems of fluidized grains in a very-narrow vertical tube can auto-defluidize after some time, the settling particles forming either a glass- or crystal-like structure. We carried out experiments using different polymer spheres,…
It is a common point that "soft" condensed matter (like granular materials or foams) can reduce damage caused by impact or explosion. It is attributed to their ability to absorb significant energy. This is certainly the case for a…
A model is developed for describing the transport of charged colloidal particles in an evaporating sessile droplet on the electrified metal substrate in the presence of a solvent flow. The model takes into account the electric charge of…
This paper is concerned with the diffusion of a fluid through a viscoelastic solid undergoing large deformations. Using ideas from the classical theory of mixtures and a thermodynamic framework based on the notion of maximization of the…
We study the fluid-mediated approach of a deformable axisymmetric object towards a rigid substrate, focusing on how its shape influences contact formation. For low approach velocities and large Stokes numbers, we show that sharper profiles…
Sublimation of drifting snow, which is significant for the balances of mass and energy of the polar ice sheet, is a complex physical process with intercoupling between ice crystals, wind field, temperature, and moisture. Here a…
The evaporation of sessile droplets on a flat surface involves a complex interplay between phase change, diffusion, advection and surface forces. In an attempt to significantly reduce the complexity of the problem and to make it manageable,…
Active fluids generate spontaneous, often chaotic mesoscale flows. Harnessing these flows to drive embedded soft materials into structures with controlled length scales and lifetimes is a key challenge at the interface between the fields of…
The yielding of foams, concentrated emulsions, pastes and other soft materials under applied strain is often characterized by measuring the complex shear modulus as a function of strain amplitude at low frequency. Results obtained for…
We present a detailed numerical study of multi-component colloidal gels interacting sterically and obtained by arrested phase separation. Under deformation, we found that the interplay between the different intertwined networks is key.…