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Under externally applied electric fields, lipid membranes tend to permeate and change their electrical resistance by the combined processes of pore creation and pore evolution (expansion or contraction). This study is focused on the pore…
Physically assembled gels have promising applications in many fields because of their tunable mechanical properties. Here, we report the mechanical properties as a function of polymer volume fraction ($\phi$) for a physical gel system…
Tree frogs are able take advantage of an interconnected network of epithelial cells in their toe pads to modulate their adhesion to surfaces under dry, wet, and flooded environments. It has been hypothesized that these interconnected…
The electric double layer structure in an electrolyte close to a solid substrate near the three-phase contact line is approximated by considering the linearized Poisson-Boltzmann equation in a wedge geometry. The mathematical approach…
Analytical expressions for the osmotic pressure of electrolytes confined within electrolyte-filled, hollow, charged nanoparticles are studied using contact theorems for cavity nanoshells immersed in a low-concentration electrolyte. Three…
We study the properties of polyelectrolyte chains under different solvent conditions, using a variational technique. The free energy and the conformational properties of a polyelectrolyte chain are studied minimizing the free energy $F_N$,…
Polymeric materials that couple deformation and electrostatics have the potential for use in soft sensors and actuators with potential applications ranging from robotic, biomedical, energy, aerospace and automotive technologies. In contrast…
We solve the nonlinear Poisson-Boltzmann equation for two parallel and likely charged plates both inside a symmetric elecrolyte, and inside a 2 : 1 asymmetric electrolyte, in terms of Weierstrass elliptic functions. From these solutions we…
Stretching dynamics of polymers in microfluidics is of particular interest for polymer scientists. As a charged polymer, a polyelectrolyte can be deformed from its coiled equilibrium configuration to an extended chain by applying uniform or…
Phase separation in salt-free symmetric mixtures of oppositely charged rodlike polyelectrolytes is studied using quasi-analytical calculations. Stability analyses for the isotropic-isotropic and the isotropic-nematic phase transitions in…
The adsorption of highly \textit{oppositely} charged flexible polyelectrolytes (PEs) on a charged planar substrate is investigated by means of Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. We study in detail the equilibrium structure of the first few PE…
Optical tweezers are employed to measure the forces of interaction within a single pair of DNA-grafted colloids in dependence of the molecular weight of the DNA-chains, and the concentration and valence of the surrounding ionic medium. The…
The recent discovery of electro-active polymers has shown great promises in the field of soft robotics, and was logically followed by experimental, numerical and theoretical developments. Most of these studies were concerned with systems…
Polymer brushes are attractive as surface coatings for a wide range of applications, from fundamental research to everyday life, and also play important roles in biological systems. How colloids (e.g., functional nanoparticles, proteins,…
In mixtures of colloids and nonadsorbing polyelectrolytes, a Donnan potential arises across the region between surfaces that are depleted of polyelectrolyte and the rest of the system. This Donnan potential tends to shift the…
The modelling of the adherence energy during peeling of Pressure Sensitive Adhesives (PSA) has received much attention since the 1950's, uncovering several factors that aim at explaining their high adherence on most substrates, such as the…
Confinement strongly influences electrochemical systems, where structural control has enabled advances in nanofluidics, sensing, and energy storage. In electric double-layer capacitors (EDLCs), or supercapacitors, energy density is governed…
The phenomenon of electrowetting, i.e., the dependence of the macroscopic contact angle of a fluid on the electrostatic potential of the substrate, is analyzed in terms of the density functional theory of wetting. It is shown that…
The organization of water molecules and ions between charged mineral surfaces determines the stability of colloidal suspensions and the strength of phase-separated particulate gels. In this article we assemble a density functional that…
There is a large body of literature investigating the static and dynamic properties of polyelectrolytes due both to their widespread application in industrial processes and their ubiquitous presence in biology. Because of their highly…