Related papers: Under pressure: Hydrogel swelling in a granular me…

Liquid droplets on fiber are often observed both in nature and in different engineering applications, like a fog harvesting mesh. Knowledge about drop-on-fiber morphology and its shedding under the influence of gravity can allow for the…

Liquids play an important role in adhesion and sliding friction. They behave as lubricants in human bodies especially in the joints. However, in many biological attachment systems they acts like adhesives, e.g. facilitating insects to move…

The forced intrusion of water in hydrophobic nanoporous pulverulent material is of interest for quick storage of energy. With nanometric pores the energy storage capacity is controlled by interfacial phenomena. With subnanometric pores, we…

Exploring new perspectives for green technologies is one of the challenges of the third millennium, in which the need for non-polluting and renewable powering has become primary. In this context, the use of hydrogen as a fuel is promising,…

An increasing number of proteins with intrinsically disordered domains have been shown to phase separate in buffer to form liquid-like phases. These protein condensates serve as simple models for the investigation of the more complex…

Recent experimental and computational studies have demonstrated that nanoconfinement profoundly alters the phase behavior of water, facilitating complex phase transitions at pressures and temperatures far lower than typically observed in…

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…

Unstructured proteins can modulate cellular responses to environmental conditions by undergoing coil-globule transitions and phase separation. However, the molecular mechanisms of these phenomena still need to be fully understood. Here, we…

Granular materials such as sand, powders, and food grains are ubiquitous in civil engineering, geoscience, agriculture, and medicine. While the influence of friction between the grains on the static structure of these systems is well…

Cells are modeled with spherical grains connected each other. Each cell can shrink and swell by transporting its fluid content to other connected neighbor while still maintaining its density at constant value. As a spherical part of a cell…

Biomolecules, such as proteins and RNAs, can phase separate in the cytoplasm of cells to form biomolecular condensates. Such condensates are liquid-like droplets that can wet biological surfaces such as membranes. Many molecules that…

Thermodynamics tells us to expect underwater contact between two hydrophobic surfaces to result in stronger adhesion compared to two hydrophilic surfaces. However, presence of water changes not only energetics, but also the dynamic process…

We study a dense colloidal suspension confined between two quasiparallel glass plates as a model system for a supercooled liquid in confined geometries. We directly observe the three-dimensional Brownian motion of the colloidal particles…

Gels are used to design bilayered structures with high residual stresses. The swelling of a thin layer on a compliant substrate leads to compressive stresses. The post-buckling of this layer is investigated experimentally; the wavelengths…

One of the major challenges in contemporary materials science is to build synthetic structures that can mimic responsive biological tissues, such as artificial skins and muscles. Polyelectrolyte hydrogels can provide such mechanoelectrical…

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…

An aqueous sodium chloride solution was injected at a controlled rate into a granular bed in a quasi-two-dimensional cell. The granular bed was made of dried, highly water-absorbent gel particles whose swelling rate was controlled by the…

Compaction is considered and embedded into broader granular behavior. Reversible compaction is related to the pressure exerted by agitated grains, a quantity relevant to dense flow. Irreversible compaction is derived from the loss of…

Hydrogen gas is a promising alternative to fossil fuels due to its high energy output and environmentally safe byproducts. Various morphologies of photocatalytic materials have been explored for high-efficiency H$_2$ production, for…

Everyday experience shows that cellular sheets are stiffened by the presence of a pressurized gas: from bicycle inner tubes to bubble wrap, the presence of an internal pressure increases the stiffness of otherwise floppy structures. The…