Related papers: Pattern Formation in Crumpled Hydrogel upon Rapid …
Crumpling an ordinary thin sheet transforms it into a structure with unusual mechanical behaviors, such as enhanced rigidity, emission of crackling noise, slow relaxations, and memory retention. A central challenge in explaining these…
Patterning solid surfaces with varying wettability is important to manage droplets in microfluidics, heat transfer and printing. Solid surface roughness poses fundamental limitations including contact-line pinning and solid friction. Here,…
One of the most interesting phenomena in the soft-matter realm consists in the spontaneous formation of super-molecular structures (microphases) in condition of thermodynamic equilibrium. A simple mechanism responsible for this…
We present a computer simulation study on crystal nucleation and growth in supersaturated suspensions of mono-disperse hard spheres induced by a triangular lattice substrate. The main result is that compressed substrates are wet by the…
The present study reports the formation of self-assembled droplet pattern on the PDMS polymer coated over grooved side of DVD under saturated vapours of alcohols. Comparison of the results with breath figures formed over unconstrained side…
We study the elasto-plastic behavior of dense attractive emulsions under mechanical perturbation. The attraction is introduced through non-specific depletion interactions between the droplets and is controlled by changing the concentration…
Using the theory of elasticity of polymer gels we show that large-scale cross-link density patterns written into the structure of the network in the melt state, can be revealed upon swelling by monitoring the monomer density patterns. We…
First shells of hydration and bulk solvent plays a crucial role in the folding of proteins. Here, the role of water in the dynamics of proteins has been investigated using a theoretical protein-solvent model and a statistical physics…
Hydrogels of semiflexible biopolymers such as collagen have been shown to contract axially under shear strain, in contrast to the axial dilation observed for most elastic materials. Recent work has shown that this behavior can be understood…
We consider the dynamic wetting and dewetting processes of films and droplets of complex liquids on planar surfaces, focusing on the case of colloidal suspensions, where the particle interactions can be sufficiently attractive to cause…
We report an experimental study of the development of orientational order in a crumpled sheet, with a particular focus on the role played by the geometry of confinement. Our experiments are performed on elastomeric sheets immersed in a…
Blisters, delaminated regions that form in multilayered structures under compressive stresses, are observed across a wide range of length scales, from two-dimensional materials to protective coatings and laminated composites. Far from being…
In layered materials, a common mode of deformation involves buckling of the layers under tensile deformation in the direction perpendicular to the layers. The instability mechanism, which operates in elastic materials from geological to…
We define a lattice model for the interaction of a polymer with water. We solve the model in a suitable approximation. In the case of a non-polar homopolymer, for reasonable values of the parameters, the polymer is found in a non-compact…
The method of formation of nanoparticle aggregates such as high-coverage spherical shells of microspheres or 3-D micro crystals grown in the geometry unaffected by a substrate is described. In the reported experiment, the evaporation of…
We present an extensive experimental study of mode-I, steady, slow crack dynamics in gelatin gels. Taking advantage of the sensitivity of the elastic stiffness to gel composition and history we confirm and extend the model for fracture of…
Modeling of wrinkles and folds formation in single and multilayer graphene sheets lying on flat deformable (polymer) substrates has been carried out. It is shown that the deformability of the substrate leads to the appearance of significant…
Microgels are soft colloids that, in virtue of their polymeric nature, can react to external stimuli such as temperature or pH by changing their size. The resulting swelling/deswelling transition can be exploited in fundamental research as…
The shape of a liquid-air interface advancing on a heterogeneous surface was studied experimentally, together with the force induced by the pinning of the contact line to surface defects. Different surfaces were considered with circular…
When a rigid object approaches a soft material in a viscous fluid, hydrodynamic stresses arise in the lubricated contact region and deform the soft material. The elastic deformation modifies in turn the flow, hence generating a…