Related papers: Wrapping liquids, solids, and gases in thin sheets
Thin liquid or gas films are everywhere in nature, from foams to submillimetric bubbles at a free surface, and their rupture leaves a collection of small drops and bubbles. However, the mechanisms at play responsible for the bursting of…
The collision of a liquid drop against a small target results in the formation of a thin liquid sheet that extends radially until it reaches a maximum diameter. The subsequent retraction is due to the air-liquid surface tension. We have…
The wrinkling of thin elastic objects provides a means of generating regular patterning at small scales in applications ranging from photovoltaics to microfluidic devices. Static wrinkle patterns are known to be governed by an energetic…
Soft membranes are commonly employed in shape-morphing applications, where the material is programmed to achieve a target shape upon activation by an external trigger, and as coating layers that alter the surface characteristics of bulk…
The stability of thin liquid films on a surface depends on the excess free energy of the system involving various short-range and long-range interactions. In an unstable condition, thin liquid films may dewet into multiple small-sized…
A thin, elastic sheet floating on the surface of a liquid bath wrinkles when poked at its centre. We study the onset of wrinkling as well as the evolution of the pattern as indentation progresses far beyond the wrinkling threshold. We use…
Robotic manipulation of flexible objects is widely required in both industrial and service applications. Among such objects, paper-like materials exhibit distinct mechanical characteristics compared to cloth, being more sensitive to…
Models and simulations of the flow of thin films of fluids have many important applications in industrial and natural processes. We consider the motion of a thin layer of an incompressible, Newtonian fluid over an arbitrary solid,…
We study the deformation and dewetting of liquid films under impinging gas jets using experimental, analytical and numerical techniques. We first derive a reduced-order model (a thin-film equation) based on the long-wave assumption and on…
Simulations of the structure and dynamics of fluid films confined to a thickness of a few molecular diameters are described. Confining walls introduce layering and in-plane order in the adjacent fluid. The latter is essential to transfer of…
Using an interface displacement model derived from a microscopic density functional theory we investigate thin liquidlike wetting layers adsorbed on flat substrates with an embedded chemical heterogeneity forming a stripe. For a wide range…
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…
We investigate the mechanical response of a compressed monolayer of large and dense particles at a liquid-fluid interface: a granular raft. Upon compression, rafts first wrinkle; then, as the confinement increases, the deformation localizes…
Granular packings display a wealth of mechanical features which are of widespread significance. One of these features is creep: the slow deformation under applied stress. Creep is common for many other amorphous materials such as many…
The high inertia of classical fluid coating processes severely limits the possibility of controlling the deposited film thickness through the entrainment velocity. We describe and characterize a new experimental device where the inertia is…
Dewetting of thin polystyrene films deposited onto silicone wafers at temperatures close to the glass transition exhibits unusual dynamics and front morphologies. Here, we present a new theoretical approach of these phenomena taking into…
Soft interfaces can mediate interactions between particles bound to them. The force transmitted through the surface geometry on a particle may be expressed as a closed line integral of the surface stress tensor around that particle. This…
We study the deformation of a liquid interface with arbitrary principal curvatures by a flat circular sheet. Working first at small slopes, we determine the shape of the sheet analytically in the membrane limit, where the sheet is…
We formulate a theoretical model of the shear failure of a thin film tethered to a rigid substrate. The interface between film and substrate is modeled as a cohesive layer with randomly fluctuating shear strength/fracture energy. We…
Equilibration of polymer melts containing highly entangled long polymer chains in confinement or with free surfaces is a challenge for computer simulations. We approach this problem by first studying polymer melts based on the soft-sphere…