Related papers: Tunable Thin Elasto-Drops
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…
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…
Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
The capillary forces exerted by liquid drops and bubbles on a soft solid are directly measured using molecular dynamics simulations. The force on the solid by the liquid near the contact line is not oriented along the liquid vapor interface…
We present experiments which show that the partial wetting of droplets capped by taut elastic films is highly tunable. Adjusting the tension allows the contact angle and droplet morphology to be controlled. By exploiting these elastic…
We investigate the deformation of elastic microcapsules adsorbed at liquid-liquid interfaces. An initially spherical elastic capsule at a liquid-liquid interface undergoes circumferential stretching due to the liquid-liquid surface tension…
We describe size-varying cylindrical particles made from silicone elastomers that can serve as building blocks for robotic granular materials. The particle size variation, which is achieved by inflation, gives rise to changes in stiffness…
This research introduces a new drop fluidics, which uses a deformable and stretchable elastomeric film as the platform, instead of the commonly used rigid supports. Such a soft film impregnated with magnetic particles can be modulated with…
The deformation of an elastic micro-capsule in an infinite shear flow is studied numerically using a spectral method. The shape of the capsule and the hydrodynamic flow field are expanded into smooth basis functions. Analytic expressions…
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.…
We assess experimentally the ability of a simple flow-based sorting device, recently proposed numerically by [Zhu et al., Soft Matter, 2014, 10, 7705-7711], to separate capsules according to their stiffness. The device consists of a single…
Elastic wave propagation is intrinsically sensitive to the mechanical properties of the medium through which it travels. In soft elastomers, this makes guided elastic waves natural probes of viscoelastic and acoustoelastic behavior over a…
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…
The ability of liquid interfaces to shape slender elastic structures provides powerful strategies to control the architecture of mechanical self assemblies. However, elastocapillarity-driven intelligent design remains unexplored in more…
Elasticity of soft materials can be greatly influenced by the presence of air bubbles. Such a capillary effect is expected for a wide range of materials, from polymer gels to concentrated emulsions and colloidal suspensions. Whereas…
Thin elastic films can spontaneously attach to liquid interfaces, offering a platform for tailoring their physical, chemical, and optical properties. Current understanding of the elastocapillarity of thin films is based primarily on studies…
We present a novel approach to probe elastic properties of polyelectrolyte multilayer microcapsules. The method is based on measurements of the capsule load-deformation curves with the atomic force microscope. The experiment suggests that…
We investigate the wrinkling dynamics of a thin elastic sheet that is indented or compressed while floating on a viscous liquid. We show that the deformation speed controls the dynamics, leading to a wrinkle wavelength significantly smaller…
We report on the capillary-induced snapping of elastic beams. We show that a millimeter-sized water drop gently deposited on a thin buckled polymer strip may trigger an elastocapillary snap-through instability. We investigate experimentally…
Elastic properties and internal states of isotropic sphere packings are studied by numerical simulations. Several numerical protocols to assemble dense configurations are compared. One, which imitates experiments with lubricated contacts,…