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Paints and coatings often feature interfacial defects due to disturbances during the deposition process which, if they persist until solidification, worsen the product quality. In this article, we investigate the stability of a thin liquid…
Many soft jammed materials, such as pastes, gels, concentrated emulsions, and suspensions, possess a threshold stress, known as yield stress, that must be exceeded to cause permanent deformation or flow. In rheology, the term plastic flow…
A liquid surface touching a solid usually deforms in a near-wall meniscus region. In this work, we replace part of the free surface with a soft polymer and examine the shape of this elasto-capillary meniscus, result of the interplay between…
When a liquid droplet completely wets a hard substrate, its spreading dynamics follow Tanner's law, with the droplet radius growing as the one-tenth power of time. Here, we investigate how these dynamics change when silicone oil droplets…
Inspired by the cellular design of plant tissue, we present a new approach to make versatile, tough, highly water-swelling composites. We embed highly swelling hydrogel particles inside tough, water-permeable, elastomeric matrices. The…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
If a liquid is cooled rapidly to form a glass, its structural relaxation becomes retarded, producing a drastic increase in viscosity. In two dimensions, strong long-wavelength fluctuations persist, even at low temperature, making it…
The conformations and dynamics of semiflexible filaments subject to a homogeneous external (gravitational) field, e.g., in a centrifuge, are studied numerically and analytically. The competition between hydrodynamic drag and bending…
Surface stresses have recently emerged as a key player in the mechanics of highly compliant solids. The classic theories of contact mechanics describe adhesion with a compliant substrate as a competition between surface energies driving…
We report on the frictional properties of thin ($\approx \mu m$) poly(dimethylacrylamide) hydrogel films within contacts with spherical silica probes. In order to focus on the contribution to friction of interfacial dissipation, a dedicated…
Flow of a thin viscous film down a flat inclined plane becomes unstable to long wave interfacial fluctuations when the Reynolds number based on the mean film thickness becomes larger than a critical value (this value decreases as the angle…
Interfacial instabilities are common phenomena observed during adhesion measurements involving viscoelastic polymers or fluids. Typical probe-tack adhesion measurements with soft adhesives are conducted with rigid probes. However, in many…
We study the instability to necking of an initially cylindrical filament of soft glassy material subject to extensional stretching. By numerical simulation of the soft glassy rheology model and a simplified fluidity model, and by analytical…
Elastomers are viscoelastic materials and their properties significantly depend on the loading rate. The actual stress experienced by these materials is the sum of equilibrium and dissipative (inelastic) terms. At very low loading rates we…
The entropy of a polymer confined in a curved surface and the elastic free energy of a membrane consisting of polymers are obtained by scaling analysis. It is found that the elastic free energy of the membrane has the form of the in-plane…
Recoverable strain is the strain recovered once a stress is removed from a body, in the direction opposite to that in which the stress had acted. To date, the phenomenon has been understood as being elastic in origin: polymer chains…
To investigate the influence of inertia and slip on the instability of a liquid film on a fibre, a theoretical framework based on the axisymmetric Navier-Stokes equations is proposed via linear instability analysis. The model reveals that…
A thermodynamically related model is developed for describing elastic rubber-like behavior of amorphous and crystallizing polymers and demonstrated on example of simple extension. Both the “entropic” and “energetic”…
We report an experimental study on the drying of silica colloidal dispersions. Here we focus on a surface instability occurring in a drying paste phase before crack formation which affects the final film quality. Observations at macroscopic…
Resistive solid state sensors are widely used in multiple applications, including molecular and gas detection. Absorption or intercalation of the target species varies the lattice parameters and an effective thickness of thin films, which…