Related papers: Emergence and Growth Dynamics of Wetting-induced P…
In the classic theory of solid adhesion, surface energy drives deformation to increase contact area while bulk elasticity opposes it. Recently, solid surface stress has been shown also to play an important role in opposing deformation of…
Drops in contact with swollen, elastomeric substrates can induce a capillary-mediated phase separation in wetting ridges. Using laser scanning confocal microscopy, we visualize phase separation of oligomeric silicone oil from a crosslinked…
The deposition of droplets onto a swollen polymer network induces the formation of a wetting ridge at the contact line. Current models typically consider either viscoelastic effects or poroelastic effects, while polymeric gels often exhibit…
The contact line of a liquid drop on a solid exerts a nanometrically sharp surface traction. This provides an unprecedented tool to study highly localised and dynamic surface deformations of soft polymer networks. One of the outstanding…
Liquid drops slide more slowly over soft, deformable substrates than over rigid solids. This phenomenon can be attributed to the viscoelastic dissipation induced by the moving wetting ridge, which inhibits a rapid motion, and is called…
Guided motion of emulsions is studied via combined experimental and theoretical investigations. The focus of the work is on basic issues related to driving forces generated via a step-wise (abrupt) change in wetting properties of the…
We report an experimental investigation of the spontaneous motion of liquid droplets on soft gels with a crosslinking gradient. By systematically adjusting the spatial difference in crosslinking density, we observed that millimeter-sized…
From hydrogels and plastics to liquid crystals, soft solids cover a wide array of synthetic and biological materials that play key enabling roles in advanced technologies such as 3D printing, soft robotics, wearable electronics,…
The complicated dynamics of the contact line of a moving droplet on a solid substrate often hamper the efficient modeling of microfluidic systems. In particular, the selection of the effective boundary conditions, specifying the contact…
We propose a continuum theory of the liquid-liquid phase separation in an elastic network where phase-separated microscopic droplets rich in one fluid component can form as an interplay of fluids mixing, droplet nucleation, network…
A hydrophilic liquid, such as water, forms hydrogen bonds with a hydrophilic substrate. The strength and locality of the hydrogen bonding interactions prohibit slip of the liquid over the substrate. The question then arises how the contact…
The interplay between phase separation and wetting of multicomponent mixtures is ubiquitous in nature and technology and recently gained significant attention across scientific disciplines, due to the discovery of biomolecular condensates.…
The wetting of soft elastic substrates exhibits many features that have no counterpart on rigid surfaces. Modelling the detailed elastocapillary interactions is challenging, and has so far been limited to single contact lines or single…
We study pattern formation in gels undergoing simultaneous phase separation and orientational ordering. A 2D numerical simulation is performed using a minimal model of nonlinear elasticity with density-anisotropy coupling. For strong…
Biomolecules, such as proteins and RNAs, can phase separate in the cytoplasm of cells to form biomolecular condensates. Such condensates are liquid-like droplets that can wet biological surfaces such as membranes. Many molecules that…
The equilibrium properties of polymer droplets on a soft deformable surface are investigated by molecular dynamics simulations of a bead-spring model. The surface consists of a polymer brush with irreversibly end-tethered linear homopolymer…
The process of phase separation in elastic solids and viscous fluids is of fundamental importance to the stability and function of soft materials. We explore the dynamics of phase separation and domain growth in a viscoelastic material such…
Swelling is a volumetric-growth process in which a porous material expands by spontaneous imbibition of additional pore fluid. Swelling is distinct from other growth processes in that it is inherently poromechanical: Local expansion of the…
We report on the onset of fluid entrainment when a contact line is forced to advance over a dry solid of arbitrary wettability. We show that entrainment occurs at a critical advancing speed beyond which the balance between capillary,…
The phase separation mechanism of a binary liquid mixture off-critically quenched in its miscibility gap is nucleation and growth, its homogeneous phase reaching a metastable equilibrium state. The successive stages of growth of the…