Related papers: A silicone-based slippery polymer coating with hum…
Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain the mechanism for the extremely low friction coefficient of carbon coatings and its undesired dependence on air humidity. A decisive atomistic insight is still lacking because of the…
With the advent of the technology of the oleoplaned slippery surfaces as the better solution to self-cleaning, anti fouling and self-healing smart surfaces, the stability of the oil layer on the surfaces has caught a great deal of attention…
\textbf{Background} Hydrogels are crosslinked polymer networks that can absorb and retain a large fraction of liquid. Near a critical sliding velocity, hydrogels pressed against smooth surfaces exhibit time-dependent frictional behavior…
Pattern formation induced by wrinkling is a very common phenomenon exhibited in soft-matter substrates. In all these systems wrinkles develop in presence of compressively stressed thin films lying on compliant substrates. Here we…
We study the lubrication of fluid-immersed soft interfaces and show that elastic deformation couples tangential and normal forces and thus generates lift. We consider materials that deform easily, due to either geometry (e.g. a shell) or…
Recently, there has been much progress in the design and application of oil-repellent superoleophobic surfaces. Polyzwitterionic brush surfaces are of particular interest, because of their ability to repel oil under water, even in the…
When a liquid droplet is located above a super-hydrophobic surface, it only barely touches the solid portion of the surface, and therefore slides very easily on it. More generally, super-hydrophobic surfaces have been shown to lead to…
Recently, there has been much interest in using lubricated flat and nano-/micro-structured surfaces to achieve extreme liquid-repellency: any foreign droplet immiscible with the underlying lubricant layer was shown to slide off at a small…
A facile route for the fabrication of surface-attached hydrogel thin films with well-controlled chemistry and tailored architecture on wide range of thickness from nanometers to micrometers is reported. The synthesis, which consists in…
We present single contact friction experiments between a glassy polymer and smooth silica substrates grafted with alkylsilane layers of different coverage densities and morphologies. This allows us to adjust the polymer/substrate…
We investigate the mechanical properties of bilayers of 1,2-dipalmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine in the gel phase by using peak force tapping with quantitative nanomechanical mapping. We study both dry and aqueous bilayers and liposomes…
Modification of surfaces to enable dropwise condensation is a promising approach for achieving high condensation rates. In this work, we present an experimental study on condensation of water on copper surfaces coated with an ultrathin, 5…
Enormous enhancement in the viscosity of a liquid near its glass transition is generally connected to the growing many-body static correlations near the transition, often coined as `amorphous ordering'. Estimating the length scales of such…
Shear viscosity and wall slip of dense suspensions of a silicone polymer incorporated with polydisperse particles were investigated. Three types of particles with low aspect ratios were used to achieve a relatively high maximum packing…
The dependence of the structure of a phospholipid layer (DSPC and SOPC) adsorbed on a hydrosol substrate on the concentration of NaOH in a solution of 5-nm silica particles has been studied by X-ray reflectrometry with the use of…
We probe the temperature dependence of friction at the interface between a glassy poly(methylmethacrylate) lens and a flat substrate coated with a methyl-terminated self-assembled monolayer. The monolayer exhibits density defects which act…
We designed spongy monoliths allowing liquid delivery to their surfaces through continuous nanopore systems (mean pore diameter ca. 40 nm). These nanoporous monoliths were flat or patterned with microspherical structures a few 10 microns in…
Thin liquid films on surfaces are part of our everyday life, they serve e.g. as coatings or lubricants. The stability of a thin layer is governed by interfacial forces, described by the effective interface potential, and has been subject of…
We describe a microscope-based optical setup that allows us to perform space-and time-resolved measurements of the spectral reflectance of transparent substrates coated with ultrathin films. This technique is applied to investigate the…
We experimentally explore pressure-driven flow of water and n-hexane across nanoporous silica (Vycor glass monoliths with 7 or 10 nm pore diameters, respectively) as a function of temperature and surface functionalization (native and…