Related papers: Stability of Monomer-Dimer Piles
By means of contact-density chain-growth simulations, we investigate a simple lattice model of a flexible polymer interacting with an attractive substrate. The contact density is a function of the numbers of monomer-substrate and…
Nanoparticle reinforced alloys offer the potential of high strength, high temperature alloys. While promising, during rapid solidification processes, alloys suffer from nanoparticle clustering, which can discount any strength benefit. An…
In laboratory experiments, we study the motion of levitated, sedimenting clouds of sub-mm grains at low ambient pressure and at high solid-to-gas ratios $\epsilon$. The experiments show a collective behavior of particles, i.e. grains in…
Capillary forces significantly affect the stability of sandpiles. We analyze the stability of sandpiles with such forces, and find that the critical angle is unchanged in the limit of an infinitely large system; however, this angle is…
An interesting recent paper by Menga, Carbone & Dini (MCD, 2018, [1]), suggests that in sliding adhesive contacts, the contact area should increase due to tangential shear stresses at the interface, assumed to be constant and corresponding…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and food grains are ubiquitous in civil engineering, geoscience, agriculture, and medicine. While the influence of friction between the grains on the static structure of these systems is well…
Control of frictional interactions among liquid-suspended particles has led to tunable, strikingly non-Newtonian rheology via the formation of strong flow constraints as particles come into close proximity under shear. Typically, these…
A theoretical model of stabilization of a microtubule assembly due to microtubule-associated-proteins(MAP) is presented. MAPs are assumed to bind to the microtubule filaments, thus preventing their disintegration following hydrolysis and…
In the past, laboratory experiments and theoretical calculations showed a mismatch in derived sticking properties of silicates in the context of planetesimal formation. It has been proposed by Kimura et al. (2015) that this mismatch is due…
With a novel 3D discrete-element method specially developed with adhesive contact mechanics, random loose packings of uniform spherical micron-sized particles are fully investigated. The results show that large velocity, large size or weak…
Would a raindrop impacting on a coarse beach behave differently from that impacting on a desert of fine sand? We study this question by a series of model experiments, where the packing density of the granular target, the wettability of…
By Monte Carlo simulations of a soft ellipsoid model for liquid crystals, we study whether a layer of grafted liquid-crystalline chain molecules can induce tilt in a nematic fluid. The chains are fairly short (four monomers) and made of the…
Interferometry can completely redirect light, providing the potential for strong and controllable optical forces. However, small particles do not naturally act like interferometric beamsplitters, and the optical scattering from them is not…
We report molecular dynamics simulation results on the equilibrium properties of polymer thin films adsorbed onto flat and curved substrates. We first systematically determine the contact angle of polymer droplets on flat substrates as a…
Finding the optimal random packing of non-spherical particles is an open problem with great significance in a broad range of scientific and engineering fields. So far, this search has been performed only empirically on a case-by-case basis,…
When an object impacts onto a bed of very loose, fine sand, the drag it experiences depends on the ambient pressure in a surprising way: Drag is found to increase significantly with decreasing pressure. We use a modified penetrometer…
We study theoretically the formation of long-wavelength instability patterns observed at spreading of nematic droplets on liquid substrates. The role of surface-like elastic terms such as saddle-splay and anchoring in nematic films of…
We investigate the effective friction encountered by a mass sliding on a granular layer as a function of bed thickness and boundary roughness conditions. The observed friction has minima for a small number of layers before it increases and…
We propose that several mechanisms contribute to friction in a polymer melt adsorbed at a structured surface. The first one is the well known disentanglement of bulk polymer chains from the surface layer. However, if the surface is ideal at…
Collisions of mm-size dust aggregates play a crucial role in the early phases of planet formation. We developed a laboratory setup to observe collisions of dust aggregates levitating at mbar pressures and elevated temperatures of 800 K. We…