Related papers: Tunable Thin Elasto-Drops
We describe a numerical method to simulate an elastic shell immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid. The method is developed as an extension of the immersed boundary method using shell equations based on the Kirchhoff-Love and the planar…
We discuss the role of elastic stress in the statistical properties of elastic turbulence, realized by the flow of a polymer solution between two disks. The dynamics of the elastic stress are analogous to those of a small scale fast dynamo…
Achieving control and tunability of lyotropic materials has been a long-standing goal of liquid crystal research. Here we show that the elasticity of a liquid crystal system consisting of a dense suspension of semiflexible biopolymers can…
We study the dewetting of liquid films capped by a thin elastomeric layer. When the tension in the elastomer is isotropic, circular holes grow at a rate which decreases with increasing tension. The morphology of holes and rim stability can…
We present Tuna-step, a novel microfluidic module based on step emulsification that allows for reliable generation of droplets of different sizes. Until now, sizes of droplets generated with step emulsification were hard-wired into the…
Nematic elastomers and glasses deform spontaneously when subjected to temperature changes. This property can be exploited in the design of heterogeneously patterned thin sheets that deform into a non-trivial shape when heated or cooled. In…
Thin dielectric elastomers with compliant electrodes exhibit various types of instability under the action of electromechanical loading. Guided by the thermodynamically-based formulation of Fosdick and Tang (J. Elasticity 88, 255-297,…
Here, we trap and control the position of droplets to study their dynamics using hydrodynamic forces alone without an external field. The hydrodynamic trap is adapted from a previously implemented Stokes trap by incorporating a…
We demonstrate a novel technique to fabricate mechanically tunable slippery surfaces using one dimensional (anisotropic) elastic wrinkles. Such wrinkles show tunable topography (amplitude) on the application of mechanical strain. Following…
In this paper, a novel fully 3D, microfluidic-oriented, gel-based, and low-cost highly stretchable resistive sensors have been presented. By the proposed method we are able to measure and discriminate all of the stretch, twist, and pressure…
Liquid crystal elastomers represent a novel class of programmable shape-transforming materials whose shape change trajectory is encoded in the material's nematic director field. Using three-dimensional nonlinear finite element…
The wetting of soft elastic substrates exhibits many features that have no counterpart on rigid surfaces. Modelling the detailed elastocapillary interactions is challenging, and has so far been limited to single contact lines or single…
We consider the equilibrium of liquid droplets sitting on thin elastic sheets that are subject to a boundary tension and/or are clamped at their edge. We use scaling arguments, together with a detailed analysis based on the…
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
Weak wave turbulence has been observed on a thin elastic plate in previous work. Here we report theoretical, experimental and numerical studies of wave turbulence in a thin elastic plate submitted to increasing tension. When increasing the…
Soft valves serve to modulate and rectify flows in complex vasculatures across the tree of life, e.g. in the heart of every human reading this. Here we consider a minimal physical model of the heart mitral valve modeled as a flexible…
We study numerically how multiple deformable capsules squeeze into a constriction. This situation is largely encountered in microfluidic chips designed to manipulate living cells, which are soft entities. We use fully three-dimensional…
We present a new model to describe the unusual elastic properties of compressed emulsions. The response of a single droplet under compression is investigated numerically for different Wigner-Seitz cells. The response is softer than…
The nonlinear mechanics of a flexible elastic rod constrained at its edges by a pair of sliding sleeves is analyzed. The planar equilibrium configurations of this variable-length elastica are found to have shape defined only by the…
We develop a theory for drying-induced stresses in sessile, poroelastic drops undergoing evaporation on rigid surfaces. Using a lubrication-like approximation, the governing equations of three-dimensional nonlinear poroelasticity are…