Related papers: Wetting ridge dissipation at large deformations
Liquid drops on soft solids generate strong deformations below the contact line, resulting from a balance of capillary and elastic forces. The movement of these drops may cause strong, potentially singular dissipation in the soft solid.…
Soft substrates are deformed by liquid-vapor surface tension upon contact with liquid droplets, forming the well-known wetting ridge. This ridge dynamically propagates with the moving contact line and critically influences liquid spreading.…
The surface tension of partially wetting droplets deforms soft substrates. These deformations are usually localized to a narrow region near the contact line, forming a so-called `elastocapillary ridge.' When a droplet slides along a…
The spreading of liquid drops on soft substrates is extremely slow, owing to strong viscoelastic dissipation inside the solid. A detailed understanding of the spreading dynamics has remained elusive, partly owing to the difficulty in…
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…
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…
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…
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 show that energy dissipation partition between a liquid and a solid controls the shape and stability of droplets sliding on viscoelastic gels. When both phases dissipate energy equally, droplet dynamics is similar to that on rigid…
Anisotropically wetting substrates enable useful control of droplet behavior across a range of applications. Usually, these involve chemically or physically patterning the substrate surface, or applying gradients in properties like…
A droplet that impacts onto a solid substrate deforms in a complex dynamics. To extract the principal mechanisms that dominate this dynamics we deploy numerical simulations based on the phase field method. Direct comparison with experiments…
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…
A droplet can deform a soft substrate due to capillary forces when they are in contact. We study the static deformation of a soft solid layer coated on a rigid cylindrical fiber when an axisymmetric barrel-shaped droplet is embracing it. We…
A liquid drop impacting a dry solid surface with sufficient kinetic energy will splash, breaking apart into numerous secondary droplets. This phenomenon shows many similarities to forced wetting, including the entrainment of air at the…
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…
Young's law fails on soft solid and liquid substrates where there are substantial deformations near the contact line. On liquid substrates, this is captured by Neumann's classic analysis, which provides a geometrical construction for…
Liquid droplets usually wet smooth and homogeneous substrates isotropically. Recent research works have revealed that droplets sit, slide and spread anisotropically on uniaxially stretched soft substrates, showing an enhanced wettability…
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,…
Although realizing wetting transitions of droplets spontaneously on solid rough surfaces is quite challenging, it is becoming a key research topic in many practical applications which require highly efficient removal of liquid. We report…
Microstructured surfaces that control the direction of liquid transport are not only ubiquitous in nature, but they are also central to technological processes such as fog/water harvesting, oil-water separation, and surface lubrication.…