Related papers: Pattern Formation in Crumpled Hydrogel upon Rapid …
When a thin sheet is crushed into a small three-dimensional volume, it invariably forms a structure with a low volume fraction but high resistance to further compression. Being a far-from-equilibrium process, forced crumpling is not…
Crumpled paper or drapery patterns are everyday examples of how elastic sheets can respond to external forcing. In this Letter, we study experimentally a novel sort of forcing. We consider a circular flexible plate clamped at its center and…
Dispersed colloidal particles within a suspension can aggregate and spontaneously self-organize into a robust, percolating structure known as a gel. These network-like structures are prevalent in nature and play a critical role in many…
When a soft hydrogel sphere is placed on a rigid hydrophilic substrate, it undergoes arrested spreading by forming an axisymmetric foot near the contact line, while conserving its global spherical shape. In contrast, liquid water (that…
When a liquid film lies on a non-wettable substrate, the configuration is unstable and the film then retracts from a solid substrate to form droplets. This phenomenon, known as dewetting, commonly leads to undesirable morphological changes.…
A hydrostatically stressed soft elastic film circumvents the imposed constraint by undergoing a morphological instability, the wavelength of which is dictated by the minimization of the surface and the elastic strain energies of the film.…
Entangled polymers are deformed by a strong shear flow. The shape of the polymer, called the form factor, is measured by small angle neutron scattering. However, the real-space molecular structure is not directly available from the…
The dynamic of contact formation between soft materials immersed in a fluid is accompanied by fluid drainage and elastic deformation. As a result, controlling the coupling between lubrication pressure and elasticity provides strategies to…
Liquid mixtures composed of colloidal particles and much smaller non-adsorbing linear homopolymers can undergo a gelation transition due to polymer-mediated depletion forces. We now show that the addition of linear polymers to suspensions…
We report a study of the structure of droplets of colloidal gels containing dissolved sodium chloride. The components segregate and form intricate patterns. The salt crystalizes in fractal and multi-fractal dendritic forms which are…
In our common experience, crumpling a sheet requires external compressive force and leads to a random network of folds. However, thin sheets have been theoretically predicted to spontaneously transition from a flat to a crumpled state…
We demonstrate that discontinuous shear thickening (DST) can occur even in moderately dense, inertial suspensions of hydrodynamically interacting, frictionless soft particles. Using the Lubrication-Friction Discrete Element Method, our…
We present a study of patterns, formed in drying drops of aqueous gelatin solution containing sodium sulphate. The patterns are highly complex, consisting of a hierarchical sequence of rings which form concentric bands as well as dendritic…
The existence of a crumpled phase for self-avoiding elastic surfaces was postulated more than three decades ago using simple Flory-like scaling arguments. Despite much effort, its stability in a microscopic environment has been the subject…
We use experiments and minimal numerical models to investigate the rapidly expanding monolayer formed by the impact of a dense suspension drop against a smooth solid surface. The expansion creates a lace-like pattern of particle clusters…
An elastic membrane that is forced to reside in a container smaller than its natural size will deform and, upon further volume reduction, eventually crumple. The crumpled state is characterized by the localization of energy in a complex…
Predicting the large-amplitude deformations of thin elastic sheets is difficult due to the complications of self-contact, geometric nonlinearities, and a multitude of low-lying energy states. We study a simple two-dimensional setting where…
We study the onset of delamination blisters in a growing elastic sheet adhered to a flat stiff substrate. When the ends of the sheet are kept fixed, its growth arouses residual stresses that lead to delamination. This instability can be…
We present results from extensive molecular dynamics simulations of collapse transitions of hydrophobic polymers in explicit water focused on understanding effects of lengthscale of the hydrophobic surface and of attractive interactions on…
Elastic capsules, prepared from droplets or bubbles attached to a capillary (as in a pendant drop tensiometer), can be deflated by suction through the capillary. We study this deflation and show that a combined analysis of the shape and…