Related papers: Gel rupture in a dynamic environment
Entanglement of polymer chains is ubiquitous in elastomers, gels, and biological tissues. While the effects of chain entanglement on elasticity and viscoelasticity of polymer networks have been intensively studied, it remains elusive how…
The nucleation and propagation of hydrofractures by injection of over pressured fluids in an elastic and isotropic medium are studied experimentally. Non-Newtonian fluids are injected inside a gelatine whose mechanical properties are…
Soft membranes are commonly employed in shape-morphing applications, where the material is programmed to achieve a target shape upon activation by an external trigger, and as coating layers that alter the surface characteristics of bulk…
We analyse a problem of a hydraulic fracture driven by a non-Newtonian shear-thinning fluid. Fluid viscosity is described by the four-parameter truncated power-law model. By varying the parameters of the rheological model we investigate…
Hydrogels are particularly versatile materials that are widely found in both Nature and industry. One key reason for this versatility is their high water content, which lets them dramatically change their volume and many of their mechanical…
From hydrogels and plastics to liquid crystals, soft solids cover a wide array of synthetic and biological materials that play key enabling roles in advanced technologies such as 3D printing, soft robotics, wearable electronics,…
Osmotic pressure is the driving force for the swelling of hydrogels. The hydrogel osmotic pressure can be decomposed into two parts: the mixing part due to polymer-solvent interaction and the elastic part due to polymer chain stretching.…
Control of the swelling, chemical functionalization, and adhesivity of hydrogels are finding new applications in a wide range of material systems. We investigate experimentally the effect of adsorbed particles on hydrogels on the depinning…
We study experimentally the fracture mechanisms of a model cohesive granular medium consisting of glass beads held together by solidified polymer bridges. The elastic response of this material can be controlled by changing the cross-linking…
First shells of hydration and bulk solvent plays a crucial role in the folding of proteins. Here, the role of water in the dynamics of proteins has been investigated using a theoretical protein-solvent model and a statistical physics…
We present a novel dynamic light scattering setup to probe, with time and space resolution, the microscopic dynamics of soft matter systems confined within millimeter-sized spherical drops. By using an ad-hoc optical layout, we tackle the…
Disordered systems under applied loading display slow creep flows at finite temperature, which can lead to the material rupture. Renormalization group arguments predicted that creep proceeds via thermal avalanches of activated events.…
In this paper we study the elastic response of synthetic hydrogels to an applied shear stress. The hydrogels studied here have previously been shown to mimic the behaviour of biopolymer networks when they are sufficiently far above the gel…
We have designed a new experimental setup able to investigate fracture of soft materials at small scales. At high crack velocity, where energy is mostly dissipated through viscoelastic processes, we observe an increasingly large high strain…
Using numerical simulations, we study the dynamical evolution of particles interacting via competing long-range repulsion and short-range attraction in two dimensions. The particles are compressed using a time-dependent quasi-one…
The breakup of water droplets when exposed to high-speed gas flows is investigated using both high-magnification shadowgraphy experiments as well as fully three-dimensional numerical simulations, which account for viscous as well as…
We show that energy dissipation partition between a liquid and a solid controls the shape and stability of droplets sliding on viscoelastic gels. When both phases dissipate energy equally, droplet dynamics is similar to that on rigid…
Acid-induced release of stored ions from polyacrylic acid hydrogels (with a free surface fully permeable to the ion and acid flux) was observed to increase the gel osmotic pressure that leads to rapid, temporary swelling faster than the…
Letting free polymers diffuse from solution into a crosslinked polymer gel is often a crucial processing step in the synthesis of multiphase polymer-based gels, e.g., core-shell microgels. Here we use coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
By performing extensive simulations with unprecedentedly large system sizes, we unveil how rigidity influences the fracture of disordered materials. We observe the largest damage in networks with connectivity close to the isostatic point…