Related papers: Shearing-induced contact pattern formation in hydr…
The influence of a stationary shear flow on the crystallization in a glassy system is studied by means of molecular dynamics simulations and subsequent cluster analysis. The results reveal two opposite effects of the shear flow on the…
Soft adhesive contacts are ubiquitous in nature and are increasingly used in synthetic systems, such as flexible electronics and soft robots, due to their advantages over traditional joining techniques. While methods to study the failure of…
A nonequilibrium molecular dynamics computer simulation on microsegregated solutions of symmetrical diblock copolymers is reported. As the polymer concentration increases, the system undergoes phase transitions in the following order: body…
Catch bonds are interactions whose lifetimes increase under mechanical load, a counterintuitive behaviour that underlies diverse biological processes. Translating this mechanism to synthetic materials offers the potential to create systems…
During oscillatory wetting, a phase retardation emerges between contact angle variation and contact line velocity, presenting as a hysteresis loop in their correlation -- an effect we term dynamic hysteresis. This phenomenon is found to be…
An interesting recent paper by Menga, Carbone & Dini (MCD, 2018, [1]), suggests that in sliding adhesive contacts, the contact area should increase due to tangential shear stresses at the interface, assumed to be constant and corresponding…
Spatially inhomogeneous shear flow occurs in entangled polymer solutions, both as steady state shear banding and transiently after a large step strain or during start up to a steady uniform shear rate. Steady state shear banding is a…
We demonstrate the existence of unconventional rheological and memory properties in systems of soft-deformable particles whose energy depends on their shape, via numerical simulations. At large strains, these systems experience an…
We study the interaction-induced migration of bubbles in shear flow and observe that bubbles suspended in elastoviscoplastic emulsions organise into chains aligned in the flow direction, similarly to particles in viscoelastic fluids. To…
We study the dynamics of an active gel droplet with imposed orientational anchoring (normal or planar) at its surface. We find that if the activity is large enough droplets subject to strong anchoring spontaneously start to rotate, with the…
Liquid droplets usually wet smooth and homogeneous substrates isotropically. Recent research works have revealed that droplets sit, slide and spread anisotropically on uniaxially stretched soft substrates, showing an enhanced wettability…
Many amorphous glassy materials exhibit complex spatio-temporal mechanical response and rheology, characterized by an intermittent stress-strain response and a fluctuating velocity profile. Under quasistatic and athermal deformation…
A drop of aqueous potato starch gel with a certain mole fraction of NaCl, when dried on a glass slide, exhibits strong segregation and intricate pattern formation phenomena. The salt forms radial dendritic crystalline aggregates near the…
Polymer brush layers are responsive materials that swell in contact with good solvents and their vapors. We deposit drops of an almost completely wetting volatile oil onto an oleophilic polymer brush layer and follow the response of the…
The deposition of droplets onto a swollen polymer network induces the formation of a wetting ridge at the contact line. Current models typically consider either viscoelastic effects or poroelastic effects, while polymeric gels often exhibit…
We present an experimental and theoretical study of dry and glycerol-lubricated sliding for polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) cylinders with different surface roughness sliding on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) rubber. This system represents a…
While deeply supercooled liquids exhibit divergent viscosity and increasingly heterogeneous dynamics as the temperature drops, their structure shows only seemingly marginal changes. Understanding the nature of relaxation processes in this…
We experimentally study the vicinity of the Jamming transition by investigating the statics and the dynamics of the contact network of an horizontally shaken bi-disperse packing of photo-elastic discs. Compressing the packing very slowly,…
Soft materials are ubiquitous in technological applications that require deformability, for instance, in flexible, water-repellent coatings. However, the wetting properties of pre-strained soft materials are only beginning to be explored.…
The onset of irreversible deformation in low-temperature amorphous solids is due to the accumulation of elementary events, consisting of spacially and temporally localized atomic rearrangements involving only a few tens of atoms. Recently,…