Related papers: Characterizing hydrogel behavior under compression…
Hydrogel consists of a crosslinked polymer matrix imbibed with a solvent such as water at volume fractions that can exceed 90\%. They are important in many scientific and engineering applications due to their tunable physiochemical…
Water activity and its relationship with interactions stabilising lamellar stacks of mixed lipid bilayers in their fluid state are investigated by means of osmotic pressure measurements coupled with small-angle x-ray scattering. The…
Characterizing the elastic properties of soft materials through bulge testing relies on accurate measurement of deformation, which is experimentally challenging. To avoid measuring deformation, we propose a hydrodynamic bulge test for…
Active gels play an important role in biology and in inspiring biomimetic active materials, due to their ability to change shape, size and create their own morphology; the relevant mechanics behind these changes is driven by…
Sessile hydrogel drops on rigid surfaces exhibit wetting/contact morphology intermediate between liquid drops and glass spheres. Using density functional theory, we reveal the contact forces acting between a hydrogel and a rigid glass…
Hydrogen-bond forms a pair of asymmetric, coupled, H-bridged oscillators with ultra-short-range interactions and memory. hydrogen bond cooperative relaxation and the associated binding electron entrapment and nonbonding electron…
An adhesively stressed thin film of a soft hydrogel confined between two rigid flat substrates auto-roughens with its dominant wavelength exhibiting pronounced dependence on the film thickness (H). A linear stability analysis confirmed that…
Fluids under extreme confinement exhibit unique structures and intermolecular bonding, distinct from their bulk analogs, driving innovative applications at the water-energy nexus. Probing confined water experimentally at the length scale of…
Gelatin is often used as an analog for studying soft and biological materials in order to understand the mechanics of behavior of biological tissue in events like traumatic brain injuries. The material properties of gelatin change with the…
Soft, microscale hydrogel fibers and rods play important roles in tissue engineering, flexible electronics, soft robotics, drug delivery, sensors, and other applications. Their viscoelastic mechanical properties, while critical for their…
Power law rheology is of widespread occurrence in complex materials that are characterized by the presence of a very broad range of microstructural length and time scales. Although phenomenological models able to reproduce the observed…
Cells and other soft particles are often forced to flow in confined geometries in both laboratory and natural environments, where the elastic deformation induces an additional drag and pressure drop across the particle. In contrast with…
We present a study the initial stages of ice growth on pristine and oxygen-functionalized highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (O-HOPG), combining low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (LT-STM) and machine-learning structural…
Novel physical phenomena emerge in ultra-small sized nanomaterials. We study the limiting small-size-dependent properties of MoS$_{2}$ monolayer rhombic nanoflakes using density-functional theory on structures of size up to…
The flow behavior of a viscoelastic organogel is investigated using ultrasonic velocimetry combined with rheometry. Our gel presents a decreasing flow curve, i.e., the measured stress decreases as a function of the applied shear rate.…
The prototypical Hydrogen bond in water dimer and Hydrogen bonds in the protonated water dimer, in other small molecules, in water cyclic clusters, and in ice, covering a wide range of bond strengths, are theoretically investigated by…
Magnetocaloric cooling offers the potential to improve the efficiency of refrigeration devices and hence cut the significant CO2 emissions associated with cooling processes. A critical issue in deployment of this technology is the…
Soft particles display highly versatile properties with respect to hard colloids, even more so at fluid-fluid interfaces. In particular, microgels, consisting of a cross-linked polymer network, are able to deform and flatten upon adsorption…
We first highlight theoretically a microfluidic configuration that allows to measure two fundamental parameters describing mass transport through a membrane: the solute permeability coefficient $\mathcal{L}_D$, and the associated reflection…
Ab initio molecular dynamics simulations of liquid water under equilibrium ambient conditions, together with a novel energy decomposition analysis, have recently shown that a substantial fraction of water molecules exhibit a significant…