Related papers: Gel rupture in a dynamic environment
We use computer simulations to study the relaxation dynamics of a model for oil-in-water microemulsion droplets linked with telechelic polymers. This system exhibits both gel and glass phases and we show that the competition between these…
Microgels are soft colloidal particles that, when dispersed in a solvent, swell and deswell in response to changes in environmental conditions, such as temperature, concentration, and $p$H. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we model bulk…
We introduce a microscopically realistic model of a physical gel and use computer simulations to study its static and dynamic properties at thermal equilibrium. The phase diagram comprises a sol phase, a coexistence region ending at a…
Differential shrinkage in particulate quasi-brittle materials causes microcracking which reduces durability in these materials by increasing their mass transport properties. A hydro-mechanical three-dimensional periodic network approach was…
Colloidal gels consist of percolating networks of interconnected arms. Their mechanical properties depend on the individual arms, and on their collective behaviour. We use numerical simulations to pull on a single arm, built from a model…
Hydrogels are crosslinked polymer networks with high water content, widely employed in biomedical applications such as drug delivery, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. Injectable, depot-forming hydrogels enable sustained…
We experimentally study the formation of surface patterns in grafted hydrogel films of nanometer-to-micrometer thicknesses during imbibition-driven swelling followed by evaporation-driven shrinking. Creases are known to form at the hydrogel…
Biological hydrogels have been increasingly sought after as e.g. wound dressings or scaffolds for regenerative medicine, due to their inherent biofunctionality in biological environments. Especially in moist wound healing, the ideal…
Ab initio molecular dynamics simulations of liquid water under equilibrium ambient conditions, together with a novel energy decomposition analysis, have recently shown that a substantial fraction of water molecules exhibit a significant…
It is widely known that freezing breaks soft, wet materials. However, the mechanism underlying this damage is still not clear. To understand this process, we freeze model, brittle hydrogel samples, while observing the growth of ice-filled…
In studies of the dynamic failure of brittle hydrogels, a bound has been placed on the process zone scale - the scale where material separation and ultimate failure occur. For the polyacrylamide hydrogel system under study, this bound is…
The full 2D analysis of roughness profiles of fracture surfaces resulting from quasi-static crack propagation in gelatin gels reveals an original behavior characterized by (i) strong anisotropy with maximum roughness at $V$-independent…
The elastic coupling between plastic events is generally invoked to interpret plastic properties and failure of amorphous soft glassy materials. We report an experiment where the emergence of a self-organized plastic flow is observed well…
Double network hydrogels show remarkable mechanical performance, combining high strength and fracture toughness with sufficient stiffness to bear load, despite containing only a low density of cross-linked polymer molecules in water. We…
Characterizing the interaction between water and microscopic defects is one of the long-standing challenges in understanding a broad range of cracking processes. Different physical aspects of microscopic events, driven or influenced by…
Attractive colloidal particles can form a disordered elastic solid or gel when quenched into a two-phase region, if the volume fraction is sufficiently large. When the interactions are comparable to thermal energies the stress-bearing…
Thermo-responsive hydrogels are smart materials that rapidly switch between hydrophilic (swollen) and hydrophobic (shrunken) states when heated past a threshold temperature, resulting in order-of-magnitude changes in gel volume. Modelling…
Microgels are soft colloids that, in virtue of their polymeric nature, can react to external stimuli such as temperature or pH by changing their size. The resulting swelling/deswelling transition can be exploited in fundamental research as…
We analyse the dynamics of different routes to collapse of a constrained polyelectrolyte gel in contact with an ionic bath. The evolution of the gel is described by a model that incorporates non-linear elasticity, Stefan-Maxwell diffusion…
The design of hydrogels that combine mechanical robustness with dynamic reconfigurability remains a fundamental challenge, as increasing crosslink dissociation rates compromise network integrity. This limitation is addressed through the…