Related papers: Droplets sliding on soft solids shed elastocapilla…
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.…
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…
Liquid drops slide more slowly over soft, deformable substrates than over rigid solids. This phenomenon can be attributed to the viscoelastic dissipation induced by the moving wetting ridge, which inhibits a rapid motion, and is called…
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…
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…
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…
We study the deformation of soft solid layers in the presence of sessile droplets or capillary bridges. By incorporating the surface tension balance at the contact line, we examine the rotation of the wetting ridge and the corresponding…
We study the rolling and sliding motion of droplets on a corrugated substrate by Molecular Dynamics simulations. Droplets are driven by an external body force (gravity) and we investigate the velocity profile and dissipation mechanisms in…
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.…
We report on the elastocapillary deformation of flexible microfibers in contact with liquid droplets. A fiber is observed to bend more as the size of the contacting droplet is increased. At a critical droplet size, proportional to the…
If a droplet is placed on a substrate with a conical shape it spontaneously starts to spread in the direction of a growing fibre radius. We describe this capillary spreading dynamics by developing a lubrication approximation on a cone and…
Deformed droplets are ubiquitous in various industrial applications, such as inkjet printing, lab-on-a-chip devices, and spray cooling, and can fundamentally affect the involved applications both favorably and unfavorably. Here, we employ…
We study experimentally the dynamics of a water droplet on a tilted and vertically oscillating rigid fibre. As we vary the frequency and amplitude of the oscillations the droplet transitions between different modes: harmonic pumping,…
Fluid droplets can be induced to move over rigid or flexible surfaces under external or body forces. We describe the effect of variations in material properties of a flexible substrate as a mechanism for motion. In this paper, we consider a…
Springs can be found in many applications and biological systems, and when these are soft, they easily deform. At small scales, capillarity can induce a force leading to spring deformations when the elastocapillary number is small. We…
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 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 intricate interaction between the deformability of a substrate and the dynamic spreading of a liquid drop on the same, under the application of an electrical voltage, has remained far from being well understood. Here, we demonstrate…
We study the time evolution of a sessile liquid droplet, which is initially put onto a solid surface in a non-equilibrium configuration and then evolves towards its equilibrium shape. We adapt here the standard approach to the dynamics of…
In recent decades novel solid substrates have been designed which change their wettability in response to light or an electrostatic field. Here, we investigate a droplet on substrates with oscillating uniform wettability by varying minimium…