Related papers: A model for gelation with explicit solvent effects…
We investigate a gas of wet granular particles, covered by a thin liquid film. The dynamic evolution is governed by two-particle interactions, which are mainly due to interfacial forces in contrast to dry granular gases. When two wet grains…
Disordered biopolymer gels have striking mechanical properties including strong nonlinearities. In the case of athermal gels (such as collagen-I) the nonlinearity has long been associated with a crossover from a bending dominated to a…
We propose and study a simplified model for the surface and bulk structures of crosslinked polymer gels, into which voids are introduced through templating by surfactant micelles. Such systems were recently studied by Atomic Force…
We model the behaviour of a single colloid embedded in a cross-linked polymer gel, immersed in a viscous background fluid. External fields actuate the particle into a periodic motion, which deforms the embedding matrix and creates a local…
The behavior of cross-linking polymer solutions as they transition from liquid-like to solid-like material in flow determines success or failure in several applications. Dilute polymer solutions flow easily, while concentrated polymers or…
The melting of a binary system of charged particles confined in a {\it quasi}-one-dimensional parabolic channel is studied through Monte Carlo simulations. At zero temperature the particles are ordered in parallel chains. The melting is…
We study pattern formation in gels undergoing simultaneous phase separation and orientational ordering. A 2D numerical simulation is performed using a minimal model of nonlinear elasticity with density-anisotropy coupling. For strong…
When a gel absorbs solvent from surrounding, stress field is created in the gel, and this causes complex dynamics of the swelling behavior. Here we study this effect for disk-shaped gel by rigorously solving the diffusio-mechanical coupling…
In concentrated electrolytes with asymmetric or irregular ions, such as ionic liquids and solvent-in-salt electrolytes, ion association is more complicated than simple ion-pairing. Large branched aggregates can form at significant…
We investigate the heterogeneous dynamics in a model, where chemical gelation and glass transition interplay, focusing on the dynamical susceptibility. Two independent mechanisms give raise to the correlations, which are manifested in the…
We investigated the viscoelastic properties of colloid-polymer mixtures at intermediate colloid volume fraction and varying polymer concentrations, thereby tuning the attractive interactions. Within the examined range of polymer…
We study the temperature dependence of the superconductor-insulator transition in granular superconductors. Empirically, these systems are characterized by very broad resistance tails, which depend exponentially on the temperature, and the…
Determining the onset of rigidity in gels is a fundamental challenge with significant practical implications across different applications. Limited-valence, or patchy-particle systems have proven to be a valuable model to study the…
We present further evidence that gelation is an arrested phase separation in attractive colloid-polymer mixtures, based on a method combining confocal microscopy experiments with numerical simulations recently established in {\bf Nature…
Large scale molecular dynamics simulations are used to study drying suspensions of a binary mixture of large and small particles in explicit and implicit solvents. The solvent is first modeled explicitly and then mapped to a uniform viscous…
Suspension of particles in a fluid solvent are ubiquitous in nature, for example, water mixed with sugar or bacteria self-propelling through mucus. Particles create local flow perturbations that can modify drastically the effective…
We present a percolation model that is inspired by recent works on immiscible two-phase flow in a mixed-wet porous medium made of a mixture of grains with two different wettability properties. The percolation model is constructed on a dual…
We present a pedagogical review of the swelling thermodynamics and phase transitions of polymer gels. In particular, we discuss how features of the volume phase transition of the gel's osmotic equilibrium is analogous to other transitions…
A sheet of glassy polymers placed in a solvent shows swelling behaviors quite different from that of soft polymers (rubbers and gels). (1) Non-Fickian diffusion (called case II diffusion): As solvent permeates into the sample, a sharp front…
Using molecular dynamics computer simulations we investigate the structural and dynamical properties of a simple model for a colloidal gel at low volume fraction. We find that at low T the system is forming an open percolating cluster,…