Related papers: On the singular nature of the elastocapillary ridg…
We study the wetting of a thin elastic filament floating on a fluid surface by a droplet of another, immiscible fluid. This quasi-2D experimental system is the lower-dimensional counterpart of the wetting and wrapping of a droplet by an…
The contact angle that a liquid drop makes on a soft substrate does not obey the classical Young's relation, since the solid is deformed elastically by the action of the capillary forces. The finite elasticity of the solid also renders the…
We study here the microscopic deformations of elastic lamellae constituting a superhydrophobic substrate under different wetting conditions of a sessile droplet using electrowetting. The deformation profiles of the lamellae are…
Electrowetting on textured and lubricant infused surfaces is conventionally expected to promote enhanced droplet spreading by reducing apparent contact angles. Contrary to this intuition, we report rapid tangential droplet ejection at…
The influence of the external pressure and surface energy on the wetting transition at nanotextured interfaces is studied using molecular dynamics and continuum simulations. The surface roughness of the composite interface is introduced via…
Elasticity theory provides an accurate description of the long-wavelength vibrational dynamics of homogeneous crystalline solids, and with supplemental boundary conditions on the displacement field can also be applied to abrupt…
Recent experiments have shown that surface stresses in soft materials can have a significant strain-dependence. Here we explore the implications of this surface elasticity to show how, and when, we expect it to arise. We develop the…
The wetting of solid surfaces can be manoeuvred by altering the energy balance at the interfacial region. While electric field acts favourably to spread a droplet on a rigid surface, this tendency may be significantly suppressed over soft…
Contact angle hysteresis and generation of dynamics angle are two fundamental phenomena about the contact angle deviation from the equilibrium state. Roughness on the solid surface, disjoining pressure in the thin film, and liquid-solid…
We introduce a contact law for the normal force generated between two contacting, elastically anisotropic bodies of arbitrary geometry. The only requirement is that their surfaces be smooth and frictionless. This anisotropic contact law is…
The intricate interaction between the deformability of a substrate and the dynamic spreading of a liquid drop on the same, under the application of an electrical voltage, has remained far from being well understood. Here, we demonstrate…
The phenomenon of electrowetting, i.e., the dependence of the macroscopic contact angle of a fluid on the electrostatic potential of the substrate, is analyzed in terms of the density functional theory of wetting. It is shown that…
True contact between randomly rough solids consists of myriad individual micro-junctions. While their total area controls the adhesive friction force of the interface, other macroscopic features, including viscoelastic friction, wear,…
Anisotropically wetting substrates enable useful control of droplet behavior across a range of applications. Usually, these involve chemically or physically patterning the substrate surface, or applying gradients in properties like…
One of the most questionable issues in wetting is the vertical force balance that is excluded in Young's law. On soft deformable solids, such as biotic materials and synthetic polymers, the vertical force of liquid leads to a microscopic…
The wetting of soft elastic substrates exhibits many features that have no counterpart on rigid surfaces. Modelling the detailed elastocapillary interactions is challenging, and has so far been limited to single contact lines or single…
Droplet impact in airflow environments is ubiquitous in nature and industry, making the understanding of this multiphase behavior crucial for technologies such as anti-icing and spray cooling. In this study, the dynamics of droplet impact…
The description of point defects in chiral liquid crystals via topological methods requires the introduction of singular contact structures, a generalisation of regular contact structures where the plane field may have singularities at…
It is widely appreciated that surface tension can dominate the behavior of liquids at small scales. Solids also have surface stresses of a similar magnitude, but they are usually overlooked. However, recent work has shown that these can…
The sol-gel transition is studied in two purely entropic models consisting of hard spheres in continuous three-dimensional space, with a fraction $p$ of nearest neighbor spheres tethered by inextensible bonds. When all the tethers are…