Related papers: Rigid spheres moving through soft solids
We report an instability of a slider slowly dragged at the surface of a granular bed in a quasistatic regime. The boat-shaped slider sits on the granular medium under its own weight and is free to translate vertically and to rotate around…
We use dedicated microfluidic devices to expose soft hydrogel particles to a rapid change in the externally applied osmotic pressure and observe a non-monotonic response: After an initial rapid compression the particle slowly reswells to…
To describe many-particle systems suspended in incompressible low-Reynolds-number fluids, effective hydrodynamic interactions can be introduced. Here, we consider particles embedded in elastic media. The effective elastic interactions…
The adhesion between dry solid surfaces is typically governed by contact forces, involving surface forces and elasticity. For surfaces immersed in a fluid, out-of-contact adhesion arises due to the viscous resistance to the opening of the…
A soft, thin, elastomeric micro-cylinder is induced to roll on a solid substrate by releasing small quantity of a solvent. The solvent swells the cylinder asymmetrically at one side and evaporates out of it from where it is exposed to…
Robust empirical constitutive laws for granular materials in air or in a viscous fluid have been expressed in terms of timescales based on the dynamics of a single particle. However, some behaviours such as viscosity bifurcation or shear…
The dynamics of a stiff filament (made by connecting beads) embedded in size-polydisperse hard sphere fluid is investigated by means of molecular dynamics simulations with focus on how the degree of size-polydispersity, characterized by…
A slender object undergoing an axial compression will buckle to alleviate the stress. Typically the morphology of the deformed object depends on the bending stiffness for solids, or the viscoelastic properties for liquid threads. We study a…
Lubrication flows between two solid surfaces can be found in a variety of biological and engineering settings. In many of these systems, the lubricant exhibits viscoelastic properties, which modify the associated lubrication forces. Here,…
We use dynamic light scattering and computer simulations to study equilibrium dynamics and dynamic heterogeneity in concentrated suspensions of colloidal hard spheres. Our study covers an unprecedented density range and spans seven decades…
We present the results of a combined experimental and theoretical investigation of the surface-tension-driven coalescence of flexible structures. Specifically, we consider the dynamics of the rise of a wetting liquid between flexible sheets…
Large objects, immersed in a homogeneous granular system, migrate when subjected to vibrations. Under certain conditions large heavy objects rise and similar light ones sink to the bottom. This is called reverse buoyancy. We report an…
Motivated by roughness-induced adhesion enhancement (toughening and strengthening) in low modulus materials, we study the detachment of a sphere from a substrate in the presence of both viscoelastic dissipation at the contact edge, and…
Bubbles rising in viscoelastic liquids may exhibit a jump discontinuity of the rise velocity as a critical bubble volume is exceeded. The phenomenon has been extensively investigated in the literature, both by means of experiments as well…
The contact of a hydrogel during the rotational shearing on glass surface in concentrated polymer solution was observed in situ. Dynamic contact patterns that rotate in-phase with the rotational shearing of the gel were observed for the…
The rheological behavior of soft glassy materials basically results from the interplay between shearing forces and an intrinsic slow dynamics. This competition can be described by a microscopic theory, which can be viewed as a…
It has been known for some time that some microorganisms can swim faster in high-viscosity gel-forming polymer solutions. These gel-like media come to mimic highly viscous heterogeneous environment that these microorganisms encounter…
Over the past few decades, oscillating flexible foils have been used to study the physics of organismal propulsion in different fluid environments. Here we extend this work to a study of flexible foils in a frictional environment. When the…
Viscoelastic materials containing bubbles or drops are encountered in numerous application fields, and are presently the object of much interest. The motion of bubbles and drops in these matrices can be significantly different than in…
Detailed data describing the motion of a rigid sphere settling in unperturbed fluid is generated by means of highly-accurate spectral/spectral-element simulations with the purpose of serving as a future benchmark case. A single…