Related papers: Gel rupture in a dynamic environment

The structural arrest of a polymeric suspension might be driven by an increase of the cross--linker concentration, that drives the gel transition, as well as by an increase of the polymer density, that induces a glass transition. These…

Thermoresponsive microgels are polymeric colloidal networks that can change their size in response to a temperature variation. This peculiar feature is driven by the nature of the solvent-polymer interactions, which triggers the so-called…

Metastable gels formed by weakly attractive colloidal particles display a distinctive two-stage time-dependent settling behavior under their own weight. Initially a space-spanning network is formed that for a characteristic time, which we…

The water hydration shell has decisive impact on the structural and functional properties of RNA. Changes of RNA structure upon melting and in biochemical processes are accompanied by a change of hydration patterns, a process which is…

The emerging applications of hydrogels in devices and machines require these soft materials to maintain robustness under cyclic mechanical loads. Whereas hydrogels have been made tough to resist fracture under a single cycle of mechanical…

Active stresses in biological cells and tissues drive many developmental processes. However, increasing experimental evidence suggests that additional mechanical interactions with surrounding material can play a crucial role in guiding…

We study model near-critical polymer gelling systems made of gluten proteins dispersions stabilized at different distances from the gel point. We impose different shear rates and follow the time evolution of the stress. For sufficiently…

We explore the Mode I fracture toughness of a polymer gel containing a semi-infinite, growing crack. First, an expression is derived for the energy release rate within the linearized, small-strain setting. This expression reveals a crack…

Deformed droplets are ubiquitous in various industrial applications, such as inkjet printing, lab-on-a-chip devices, and spray cooling, and can fundamentally affect the involved applications both favorably and unfavorably. Here, we employ…

Soft materials may break irreversibly upon applying sufficiently large shear oscillations, a process which physical mechanism remains largely elusive. In this work, the rupture of protein gels made of sodium caseinate under an oscillatory…

Fatigue refers to the changes in material properties caused by repeatedly applied loads. It has been widely studied for, e.g., construction materials, but much less has been done on soft materials. Here, we characterize the fatigue dynamics…

Many organisms have an elastic skeleton that consists of a closed shell of epithelial cells that is filled with fluid, and can actively regulate both elastic forces in the shell and hydrostatic pressure inside it. In this work we introduce…

Emergent phenomena share the fascinating property of not being obvious consequences of the design of the system in which they appear. This characteristic is no less relevant when attempting to simulate such phenomena, given that the outcome…

We model flow and transport in three-dimensional fracture networks with varying degrees of fracture-to-fracture aperture/permeability heterogeneity and network density to show how changes in these properties can cause the emergence of…

Hydrophobic nanoporous materials can be intruded by water only by exerting an external action, typically increasing pressure. For some materials, water extrudes when the pressure is lowered again. Controlling intrusion/extrusion hysteresis…

Understanding the relationship between the microscopic structure and topology of a material and its macroscopic properties is a fundamental challenge across a wide range of systems. Here, we investigate the viscoelasticity of DNA nanostar…

The paper deals with the fundamental problem of a modeling of the physical, in particular, thermal hydraulic processes, in various media of fractal structure of the natural, technological and technical systems and devices. The examples of a…

We present experiments and simulations on cyclically sheared colloidal gels, and probe their behaviour on several different length scales. The shearing induces structural changes in the experimental gel, changing particles' neighborhoods…

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…

Dynamical heterogeneities in a colloidal fluid close to gelation are studied by means of computer simulations. A clear distinction between some fast particles and the rest, slow ones, is observed, yielding a picture of the gel composed by…