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Strong shear thickening and jamming in dense suspensions are driven by friction as particles are sheared into contact. Control over these frictional interactions can be achieved via particle shape and roughness, and also via the particles'…
Polymer blends offer an exciting material for various potential applications due to their tunable properties by varying constituting components and their relative composition. Our simulation results unravel an intrinsic relationship between…
Many densely packed suspensions and colloids exhibit a behavior known as Discontinuous Shear Thickening in which the shear stress jumps dramatically and reversibly as the shear rate is increased. We performed rheometry and video microscopy…
Actin flow in the cortical cytoskeleton underneath the cell membrane generates mechanical stresses that shape the cell surface. We study this mechanism using a hydrodynamic model of a compressible active gel polymerizing at the membrane and…
Supersonic shear layers experience instabilities that generate significant adverse effects; in complex configurations, these instabilities have global impacts as they foster compounding complications with other independent flow features. We…
Dense emulsions, colloidal gels, microgels, and foams all display a solid-like behavior at rest characterized by a yield stress, above which the material flows like a liquid. Such a fluidization transition often consists of long-lasting…
The sensitive and reliable in-droplet chemical analysis benefits from the enhanced partition of an analyte into the droplets. This work, we will show that chemical reactions in surface nanodroplets can shift the partition of analytes from a…
Solutions of semiflexible polymers confined by repulsive planar walls are studied by density functional theory and Molecular Dynamics simulations, to clarify the competition between the chain alignment favored by the wall and the depletion…
Hydrogels are biphasic, swollen polymer networks where elastic deformation is coupled to nanoscale fluid flow. As a consequence, hydrogels can withstand large strains and exhibit nonlinear, hyperelastic properties. For low-modulus hydrogel…
Colloidal nanocrystal gels can be assembled using a difunctional "linker" molecule to mediate bonding between nanocrystals. The conditions for gelation and the structure of the gel are controlled macroscopically by the linker concentration…
The drying of a colloidal dispersion can result in a gel phase defined as a porous matrix saturated in solvent. During the drying process, high mechanical stresses are generated. When these stresses exceed the strength of the material, they…
We present a simple model to account for the rheological behavior observed in recent experiments on micellar gels. The model combines attachment-detachment kinetics with stretching due to shear, and shows well-defined jammed and flowing…
An evaporating droplet is a dynamic system in which flow is spontaneously generated to minimize the surface energy, dragging particles to the borders and ultimately resulting in the so-called "coffee-stain effect". The situation becomes…
We show that the clogging susceptibility and flow of particles moving through a random obstacle array can be controlled with a transverse or longitudinal ac drive. The flow rate can vary over several orders of magnitude, and we find both an…
Unconfined granular flows along an inclined plane are investigated experimentally. During a long transient, the flow gets confined by quasistatic banks but still spreads laterally towards a well-defined asymptotic state following a…
We study analytically the intricate phase behavior of cross-linked $AB$ diblock copolymer melts, which can undergo two main phase transitions due to quenched random constraints: Gelation, i.e., spatially random localization of polymers…
Packings of macroscopic granular chains capture some of the essential aspects of molecular polymer systems and have been suggested as a paradigm to understand the physics on a molecular scale. However, here we demonstrate that the…
Microgels are soft colloidal particles that, when dispersed in a solvent, swell and deswell in response to changes in environmental conditions, such as temperature, concentration, and $p$H. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we model bulk…
We present an experimentally guided, multi-phase, multi-species polyelectrolyte gel model to make quantitative predictions on the electro-chemical properties of articular cartilage. The mixture theory consists of two different types of…
The behavior of microgels near surfaces and their adsorption is studied by simple scaling theory. Two different types of microgels can be studied, i.e., fractal type microgels and randomly crosslinked polymer chains. In the first case the…