Related papers: Flexible hydrogels connecting adhesion and wetting
Thermo-responsive hydrogels are smart materials that rapidly switch between hydrophilic (swollen) and hydrophobic (shrunken) states when heated past a threshold temperature, resulting in order-of-magnitude changes in gel volume. Modelling…
Wetting is a widespread phenomenon, most prominent in a number of cases, both in nature and technology. Droplets of pure water with initial radius ranging from 20 to 80 [\AA] spreading on graphitic surfaces are studied by molecular dynamics…
We study numerically local models for the mechanical contact between two solids with rough surfaces. When the solids softly touch either through adhesion or by a small normal load $L$, contact only forms at isolated patches and fluids can…
Glass formers are in general classified as strong or fragile depending on whether their relaxation rates follow Arrhenius or super-Arrhenius temperature dependence. There are however notable exceptions such as water, which exhibit a…
Insects, pick-and-place manufacturing, engineered adhesives, and soft robots employ soft materials to stick to surfaces even in the presence of roughness. Experiments show that the force required for making contact is lower than for…
Buckling induced by viscous flow changes the shape of sheet-like nanomaterial particles suspended in liquids. This instability at the particle scale affects collective behavior of suspension flows and has many technological and biological…
The stability of thin liquid films on a surface depends on the excess free energy of the system involving various short-range and long-range interactions. In an unstable condition, thin liquid films may dewet into multiple small-sized…
Elastohydrodynamic lubrication, or simply soft lubrication, refers to the motion of deformable objects near a boundary lubricated by a fluid, and is one of the key physical mechanisms to minimise friction and wear in natural and engineered…
he contact angle of a liquid droplet on a surface under partial wetting conditions differs for a nanoscopically rough or periodically corrugated surface from its value for a perfectly flat surface. Wenzel's relation attributes this…
A theoretical model for the effect of water hydrogen bonding on the thermodynamics of hydrophobic hydration is proposed as a combination of the classical density functional theory with the recently developed probabilistic approach to water…
Wettability of a substrates is characterized by a contact angle. Applicability of the simple formula developed by Derjaguin, which relates to the contact angle and disjoining pressure to nano-scale liquid droplets is reconsidered within the…
Quantifying wettability at the nanoscale remains challenging, as macroscopic contact-angle measurements fail to capture the molecular interactions that define hydrophilic and hydrophobic behavior. We derive an analytical relation linking…
The capillary traction of a liquid contact line causes highly localized deformations in soft solids, tremendously slowing down wetting and dewetting dynamics by viscoelastic braking. Enforcing nonetheless large velocities leads to the…
Understanding the fracture toughness of glasses is of prime importance for science and technology. We study it here using extensive atomistic simulations in which the interaction potential, glass transition cooling rate and loading geometry…
We study wetting droplets formed of active Brownian particles in contact with a repulsive potential barrier, in a wedge geometry. Our numerical results demonstrate a transition between partially wet and completely wet states, as a function…
It is widely appreciated that surface tension can dominate the behavior of liquids at small scales. Solids also have surface stresses of a similar magnitude, but they are usually overlooked. However, recent work has shown that these can…
Liquid droplets hanging from solid surfaces are commonplace, but their physics is complex. Examples include dew or raindrops hanging onto wires or droplets accumulating onto a cover placed over warm food or windshields. In these scenarios,…
Biological cells utilize membranes and liquid-like droplets, known as biomolecular condensates, to structure their interior. The interaction of droplets and membranes, despite being involved in several key biological processes, is so far…
The accumulation of self-propelled particles on repulsive barriers is a widely observed feature in active matter. Despite being implicated in a broad range of biological processes, from biofilm formation to cytoskeletal movement, wetting of…
When a solid plate is withdrawn from a partially wetting liquid, a liquid layer dewets the moving substrate. High-speed imaging reveals alternating thin and thick regions in the entrained layer in the transverse direction at steady state.…