Related papers: Capillary adhesion of stick insects
The sliding friction force exerted by stochastic linkers interacting with a moving filament is calculated. The elastic properties of the substrate on which the linkers are anchored are shown to strongly influence the friction force. In some…
Superhydrophobic Cassie textures with trapped gas bubbles reduce drag, by generating large effective slip, which is important for a variety of applications that involve a manipulation of liquids at the small scale. Here we discuss how the…
The motion of a long gas bubble in a confined capillary tube is ubiquitous in a wide range of engineering and biological applications. While the understanding of the deposited thin viscous film near the tube wall in Newtonian fluids is well…
We apply a recently developed model of cytoskeletal force generation to study a cell intrinsic contractility, as well as its response to external loading. The model is based on a non-equilibrium thermodynamic treatment of the…
The exceptional adhesion properties of biological fibrillar structures -- such as those found in geckos -- have inspired the development of synthetic adhesive surfaces. Among these, mushroom-shaped fibrils have demonstrated superior…
Stick-slip motion, a common phenomenon observed during crawling of cells, is found to be strongly sensitive to the substrate stiffness. Stick-slip behaviours have previously been investigated typically using purely elastic substrates. For a…
Dry adhesives rely on short-ranged intermolecular bonds, hence requiring a low elastic modulus to conform to the surface roughness of the adhered material. Under external loads, however, soft adhesives accumulate strain energy, which…
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…
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,…
Adhesive interactions between elastic structures such as graphene sheets, carbon nanotubes, and microtubules have been shown to exhibit hysteresis due to irrecoverable energy loss associated with bond breakage, even in static…
One problem of non-crystalline condensed matter (soft matter) is creating the right equilibrium between elasticity and viscosity, referred to as viscoelasticity. Manifestations of that can be found in everyday live, where the…
This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the liquid film dynamics during the oscillation of a meniscus between a liquid and its vapour in a cylindrical capillary. By using the theory of Taylor bubbles, the dynamic profile of the…
The role of surface tension and wettability in the dynamics of air-liquid interfaces during immiscible fluid displacement flows in capillary tube driven by pressure has been investigated. The contact angle and capillary number drive the…
Many organisms live in confined fluidic environments such as the thin liquid layers on the skin of host organisms or in partially- saturated soil. We investigate the collective behaviour of nematodes in a thin liquid layer, which was first…
A fungal skin is a thin flexible sheet of a living homogeneous mycelium made by a filamentous fungus. The skin could be used in future living architectures of adaptive buildings and as a sensing living skin for soft self-growing/adaptive…
Solid interfaces have intrinsic elasticity. However, in most experiments, this is obscured by bulk stresses. Through microscopic observations of the contact-line geometry of a partially wetting droplet on an anisotropically stretched…
Active fluid droplets are a class of soft materials exhibiting autonomous motion sustained by an energy supply. Such systems have been shown to capture motility regimes typical of biological cells and are ideal candidates as building-block…
We calculate the meniscus location in tapered capillaries under the influence of pressure difference and dielectrophoretic forces with and without gravity. We find that the meniscus location can be a discontinuous function of the pressure…
Collagen fibrils are the building block of many biological tissues, which viability depend on the fibrils properties. Altered properties of collagen fibrils are central to the appearance of many diseases, while physiological or native…
We study the wetting of a thin elastic filament floating on a fluid surface by a droplet of another, immiscible fluid. This quasi-2D experimental system is the lower-dimensional counterpart of the wetting and wrapping of a droplet by an…