Related papers: Unconstrained dynamic gel swelling generates trans…

In order to allow the simultaneous transport of hydrophilic and hydrophobic substances, polymeric networks with finely distributed hydrophilic and hydrophobic components are very suitable. When designing new soft materials like coatings, in…

The formation of smart emulsions or foams whose stability can be controlled on-demand by switching external parameters is of great interest for basic research and applications. An emerging group of smart stabilizers are microgels, which are…

Polymer microgels exhibit intriguing macroscopic flow properties arising from their unique microscopic structure. Microgel colloids usually comprise a crosslinked polymer network with a radially decaying density profile, resulting in a…

Disordered biopolymer gels have striking mechanical properties including strong nonlinearities. In the case of athermal gels (such as collagen-I) the nonlinearity has long been associated with a crossover from a bending dominated to a…

Viscoelastic and thermodynamic properties of transient gels formed by telechelic polymers are studied on the basis of the transient network theory that takes account of the correlation among polymer chains via network junctions. The global…

Soft materials are ubiquitous in technological applications that require deformability, for instance, in flexible, water-repellent coatings. However, the wetting properties of pre-strained soft materials are only beginning to be explored.…

Obstructions influence the growth and expansion of bodies in a wide range of settings -- but isolating and understanding their impact can be difficult in complex environments. Here, we study obstructed growth/expansion in a model system…

Attractive colloidal particles can form a disordered elastic solid or gel when quenched into a two-phase region, if the volume fraction is sufficiently large. When the interactions are comparable to thermal energies the stress-bearing…

Wrinkling is commonly observed as mechanical instability when a stiff thin film bound on a compliant thick substrate undergoes in-plane compression exceeding a threshold. Despite significant efforts to create a broad range of surface…

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…

Yielding of amorphous glasses and gels is a mechanically driven transformation of a material from the solid to liquid state on the experimental timescale. It is a ubiquitous fundamental problem of nonequilibrium physics of high importance…

We compare six elastic models for polymer networks in the context of phase separation within a gel, including a new model that combines the finite extensible Arruda-Boyce model and the slip tube model for entangled chains. We study…

We consider a three-dimensional network of aqueous droplets joined by single lipid bilayers to form a cohesive, tissue-like material. The droplets in these networks can be programmed to have distinct osmolarities so that osmotic gradients…

We report an unexpected behavior in wetting dynamics on soft silicone substrates: the dynamics of aqueous droplets deposited on vertical plates of such elastomers exhibits two successive speed regimes. This macroscopic observation is found…

We study a microscopically realistic model of a physical gel and use computer simulations to investigate its static and dynamic properties at thermal equilibrium. The phase diagram comprises a sol phase, a coexistence region ending at a…

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…

Lubricated contacts in soft materials are important in various engineering systems and natural settings. Three major lubrication regimes are boundary (BL), mixed (ML), and elasto-hydrodynamic (EHL) lubrication, where the contact region is…

We use a combination of original light scattering techniques and particles with unique optical properties to investigate the behavior of suspensions of attractive colloids under gravitational stress, following over time the concentration…

Many microorganisms swim through gels, materials with nonzero zero-frequency elastic shear modulus, such as mucus. Biological gels are typically heterogeneous, containing both a structural scaffold (network) and a fluid solvent. We analyze…

Active gel theory has recently been very successful in describing biologically active materials such as actin filaments or moving bacteria in temporally fixed and simple geometries such as cubes or spheres. Here we develop a computational…