Related papers: Stringiness of Hyaluronic Acid Emulsions
Hyaluronic acid is an abundant polyelectrolyte in the human body that forms extracellular hydrogels in connective tissues. It is essential for regulating tissue biomechanics and cell-cell communication, yet hyaluronan overexpression is…
Crumpling of a thin film leads to a unique stiff yet lightweight structure. The stiffness has been attributed to a complex interplay between four basic elements - smooth bends, sharp folds, localized points (developable cones), and…
An important strategy to stabilize emulsions is to arrest coalescence of the constituent droplets with an opposing rheological force. Colloidal particles adsorbed on the surface of emulsion droplets in a Pickering emulsion become…
The elastic properties of a soft matter material can be greatly altered by the presence of solid inclusions whose microscopic properties, such as their size and interactions, can have a dramatic effect. In order to shed light on these…
We use numerical simulations to show how a fully flexible filament binding to a deformable cylindrical surface may acquire a macroscopic persistence length and a helical conformation. This is a result of the nontrivial elastic response to…
When a flexible filament is confined to a fluid interface, the balance between capillary attraction, bending resistance, and tension from an external source can lead to a self-buckling instability. We perform an analysis of this instability…
Concentrated particulate suspensions, commonplace in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic and food industries, display intriguing rheology. In particular, the dramatic increase in viscosity with strain rate (shear thickening and jamming) which is…
Elongation is a fundament process in amyloid fiber growth, which is normally characterized by a linear relationship between the fiber elongation rate and the monomer concentration. However, in high concentration regions, a sub-linear…
Elasticity of soft materials can be greatly influenced by the presence of air bubbles. Such a capillary effect is expected for a wide range of materials, from polymer gels to concentrated emulsions and colloidal suspensions. Whereas…
Recent studies demonstrated that an elastomer containing hygroscopic inclusions absorbs moisture and swell. Here we show that a thin film of such an elastomer bonded to a rigid substrate undergoes morphological instability upon absorption…
Many biological tissues feature a heterogeneous network of fibers whose tensile and bending rigidity contribute substantially to these tissues' elastic properties. Rigidity percolation has emerged as a important paradigm for relating these…
Electrospinning is a highly sensitive fabrication process in which small variations in operating parameters can significantly influence fiber morphology and material performance. Machine learning (ML) methods are increasingly employed to…
Particle surface chemistry and internal softness are two fundamental parameters in governing the mechanical properties of dense colloidal suspensions, dictating structure and flow, therefore of interest from materials fabrication to…
When two chemically passivated solids are brought into contact, interfacial interactions between the solids compete with intrabulk elastic forces. The relative importance of these interactions, which are length-scale dependent, will be…
The structural properties of a linear polymer and its evolution in time have a strong bearing on its anisotropic stress response. The mean-square bond length and mean bond angle are the critical parameters that influence the time-varying…
An adhesively stressed thin film of a soft hydrogel confined between two rigid flat substrates auto-roughens with its dominant wavelength exhibiting pronounced dependence on the film thickness (H). A linear stability analysis confirmed that…
A hydrostatically stressed soft elastic film circumvents the imposed constraint by undergoing a morphological instability, the wavelength of which is dictated by the minimization of the surface and the elastic strain energies of the film.…
Lumen formation plays an essential role in the morphogenesis of tissues during development. Here we review the physical principles that play a role in the growth and coarsening of lumens. Solute pumping by the cell, hydraulic flows driven…
There is growing evidence that slow dynamics and dynamic heterogeneity possess structural signatures in glass-forming liquids. However, even in the weakly frustrated glass-forming liquids, whether or not the dynamic heterogeneity has a…
We perform drainage experiments of a linear alkane fluid (n-hexadecane) down to molecular thicknesses, and focus on the role played by the confinement rate. We show that molecular layering is strongly influenced by the velocity at which the…