Related papers: Polymeric Solvents Control Swelling-Induced Surfac…
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…
Thin liquid films on surfaces are part of our everyday life, they serve e.g. as coatings or lubricants. The stability of a thin layer is governed by interfacial forces, described by the effective interface potential, and has been subject of…
From biological tissues to layers of paint, macroscopic non-porous materials with the capacity to swell when brought in contact with an appropriate solvent are ubiquitous. Here, we study experimentally and theoretically one of the…
Hydrogels have had a profound impact in the fields of tissue engineering, drug delivery, and materials science as a whole. Due to the network architecture of these materials, imbibement with water often results in uniform swelling and…
Recent investigations on the coalescence of polymeric droplets on a solid substrate have reported strong disagreements; the heart of the issue is whether coalescence of polymeric drops is similar to that of Newtonian fluid and is…
From pasta to biological tissues to contact lenses, gel and gel-like materials inherently soften as they swell with water. In dry, low-relative-humidity environments, these materials stiffen as they de-swell with water. Here, we use…
We explore the Mode I fracture toughness of a polymer gel containing a semi-infinite, growing crack. First, an expression is derived for the energy release rate within the linearized, small-strain setting. This expression reveals a crack…
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 dynamics of flexible polymer molecules are often assumed to be governed by hydrodynamics of the solvent. However there is considerable evidence that internal dissipation of a polymer contributes as well. Here we investigate the dynamics…
We demonstrate the engineering of a source of radiation from growing surface plasmons (charge density oscillations) in a composite nano-system. The considered hybrid nano-structure consists of a thick layer of a conducting substrate on…
The modes of attachments, detachments and relaxations of molecules of rubbers and gels on solid surfaces are keys to understanding their frictional properties. An early stochastic model of polymer relaxations on surfaces was given by…
Many glass-forming fluids exhibit a remarkable thermodynamic scaling in which dynamic properties, such as the viscosity, the relaxation time, and the diffusion constant, can be described under different thermodynamic conditions in terms of…
Concatenation and equilibrium swelling of Olympic gels, which are composed of entangled cyclic polymers, is studied by Monte Carlo Simulations. The average number of concatenated molecules per cyclic polymers, $f_n$, is found to depend on…
Hypothesis: Slippery Omniphobic Covalently Attached Liquids (SOCAL) have been proposed for making omnirepellent thin films of self-assembled dimethylsiloxane polymer brushes grafted from silica surfaces. Smooth and flat at very small scale,…
An analytical study on crease formations in a swelling gel layer is conducted. By exploring the smallness of the layer thickness and using a method of coupled series-asymptotic expansions, the original nonlinear eigenvalue problem of…
Classical hydrodynamic models predict that infinite work is required to move a three-phase contact line, defined here as the line where a liquid/vapor interface intersects a solid surface. Assuming a slip boundary condition, in which the…
Microgels made of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) are the prototype of soft, thermoresponsive particles widely used to study fundamental problems in condensed matter physics. However, their internal structure is far from homogeneous, and…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
We study the equilibrium properties and the wetting behavior of a simple liquid on a polymer brush, with and without presence of lubricant by multibody Dissipative Particle Dynamics simulations. The lubricant is modelled as a polymeric…
Liquid droplets on soft solids, such as soft polymeric gels, can induce substantial surface deformations, leading to the formation of wetting ridges at contact points. While these contact ridges have been shown to govern the rich surface…