Related papers: Gel rupture in a dynamic environment
Dispersed colloidal particles within a suspension can aggregate and spontaneously self-organize into a robust, percolating structure known as a gel. These network-like structures are prevalent in nature and play a critical role in many…
In this paper, a micro-mechanical model is introduce to characterize the stress softening phenomenon in double network hydrogels. Damage in polymer matrices under deformation, which appears as the rupture of cross-linking, is assumed to…
A liquid droplet resting on a soft gel substrate can deform that substrate to the point of material failure, whereby fractures develop on the gel surface that propagate outwards from the contact-line in a starburst pattern. In this paper,…
Materials are often heterogeneous at various length scales, with variations in grain structure, defects, and composition which has a strong influence on the emergent macroscopic plastic behavior. In particular, heterogeneities lead to…
In polymers melts and supercooled liquids, the glassy dynamics is characterized by the rattling of monomers or particles in the cage formed by their neighbors. Recently, a direct correlation in such systems, described by a universal scaling…
The dynamic fragmentation of residually stressed solids involves a complex interplay between stored elastic energy, stress wave propagation, and crack instabilities. In this work, we investigate the fracture mechanics of chemically…
The deformation and breakup of droplets in airflows is important in spray and atomisation processes, but the shear effect in non-uniform airflow is rarely reported. In this study, the deformation and breakup of droplets in a shear flow of…
Liquid droplets on soft solids, such as soft polymeric gels, can induce substantial surface deformations, leading to the formation of wetting ridges at contact points. While these contact ridges have been shown to govern the rich surface…
Prediction of hydrogen embrittlement requires a robust modelling approach and this will foster the safe adoption of hydrogen as a clean energy vector. A generalised computational model for hydrogen embrittlement is here presented, based on…
Hollow microgels are elastic polymer shells easily realizable in experiments. Recent works have shown the emergence of buckling events in dilute hollow microgels under the effect of an added osmotic pressure. Here, we perform large-scale…
Buckling induced by viscous flow changes the shape of sheet-like nanomaterial particles suspended in liquids. This instability at the particle scale affects collective behavior of suspension flows and has many technological and biological…
We study creep flow and yielding of particulate depletion gels under constant shear stress, combining data on different length and time scales. We characterise the breakage of meso-scale strands in the gel. Breakage events are distributed…
By using fluid-kinetic simulations of confined and concentrated emulsion droplets, we investigate the nature of space non-homogeneity in soft-glassy dynamics and provide quantitative measurements of the statistical features of plastic…
We investigate the delayed rupture of biopolymer gels under a constant shear load by simultaneous dynamic light scattering and rheology measurements. We unveil the crucial role of normal stresses built up during gelation: all samples that…
Usually, the strain-induced softening behaviour observed in the differential modulus $K(T,\gamma)$ of hydrogels has been attributed to the breakage of internal structures of the network, such as the cross-links that bind together the…
We recast the problem of hydrogel swelling under physical constraints as an energy optimization problem. We apply this approach to compute equilibrium shapes of hydrogel spheres confined within a jammed matrix of rigid beads, and interpret…
Entangled states are ubiquitous amongst fibrous materials, whether naturally occurring (keratin, collagen, DNA) or synthetic (nanotube assemblies, elastane). A key mechanical characteristic of these systems is their ability to reorganise in…
The contact of a hydrogel during the rotational shearing on glass surface in concentrated polymer solution was observed in situ. Dynamic contact patterns that rotate in-phase with the rotational shearing of the gel were observed for the…
Colloidal gels have unique mechanical and transport properties that stem from their bicontinous nature, in which a colloidal network is intertwined with a viscous solvent, and have found numerous applications in foods, cosmetics,…
The local and global dynamics of a sheared granular medium are studied in a model experiment as a function of several macroscopic parameters. We observe that by changing the shear rate or the loading stiffness, the system crackles, with…