Related papers: Large and non-linear permeability amplification wi…
Hydrogels have a distinct combination of mechanical and water-transport behaviors. As hydrogels stiffen, they become less permeable. Here, we combine semi-dilute polymer theory with the Kozeny-Carman equation to develop a simple scaling law…
Protein nanoparticles have been proven to be highly effective stabilizers of water-in-water emulsions obtained from a number of different types of aqueous two-phase systems (ATPS). The stabilizing efficiency of such particles is attributed…
Flow-induced failure of granular materials is relevant to a broad range of geomechanical applications. Plasticity, which is the inherent failure mechanism of most granular materials, enables large deformations that can invalidate linearised…
Differential shrinkage in particulate quasi-brittle materials causes microcracking which reduces durability in these materials by increasing their mass transport properties. A hydro-mechanical three-dimensional periodic network approach was…
Liquid crystal networks exploit the coupling between the responsivity of liquid-crystalline mesogens, e.g., to electric fields, and the (visco)elastic properties of a polymer network. Because of this, these materials have been put forward…
We combine small angle scattering experiments and simulations to investigate the internal structure and interactions of composite Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide)-Poly(ethylene glycol) (PNIPAM-PEG) microgels. At low temperatures the…
Hydrogel diffusiophoresis is the deformation of a hydrogel due to a solute gradient that leads to a gradient of pairwise interactions between the solute particles and the hydrogel polymers to trigger osmotic flux. Unlike typical osmosis, it…
Polymers are known to wet nanopores with high surface energy through an atomically thin precursor film followed by slower capillary filling. We present here light interference spectroscopy using a nanoporous membrane-based chip that allows…
The addition of minute amounts of chemically inert polyacrylamide polymer to liquids results in large instabilities under steady electro-osmotic pumping through 2:1 constrictions, demonstrating that laminar flow conditions can be broken in…
Self-assembly of polymers at liquid interfaces using non-covalent interactions has emerged as a promising technique to reversibly produce self-healing membranes. Besides the assembly process, it is also crucial to control the mechanical…
We study the diffusion of a linear polymer in the presence of permeable membranes without excluded volume interactions, using scaling theory and Monte Carlo simulations. We find that the average time it takes for a chain with polymerization…
Hydrogels have had a profound impact in the fields of tissue engineering, drug delivery, and materials science as a whole. Due to the network architecture of these materials, imbibement with water often results in uniform swelling and…
Active materials capable of autonomously modulating their mechanical properties are foundational to the development of next-generation soft technologies. Here, we introduce a novel class of extensible biohybrid hydrogels powered by living…
The development of nanoscale nonlinear elements in photonic integrated circuits is hindered by the physical limits to the nonlinear optical response of dielectrics, which requires that the interacting waves propagate in transparent volumes…
To probe the effects of hydrogel particle additives on the water-accessible pore structure of sandy soils, we introduce a custom pressure plate method in which the volume of water expelled from a wet granular packing is measured as a…
Experimental results from mechanical viscoelastic as well as dielectric relaxation times were compared to theoretical expectations utilizing polymer scaling theory. Viscoelastic relaxation of a hydrogel at 33% relative humidity fabricated…
Hypothesis: The peculiar swelling behaviour of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM)-based responsive microgels provides the possibility to tune both softness and volume fraction with temperature, making these systems of great interest for…
Moisture-capturing hydrogels have emerged as attractive sorbent materials capable of converting ambient humidity into liquid water. Recent works have demonstrated exceptional water capture capabilities of hydrogels, while simultaneously,…
When a hydrophilic and deformable porous material is immersed in a bath, it may absorb the solvent and expand by several times its volume, thus forming a highly soft and porous hydrogel. A stress applied on the soft hydrogel surface deforms…
A technique for determining the permeability of a phospholipid membrane on a single giant unilamellar vesicle (GUV) is described, which complements the existing methods utilizing either a planar black lipid membrane or sub-micrometre-sized…