Related papers: Critical confinement and elastic instability in th…
The instability, dynamics and morphological transitions of patterns in thin liquid films on periodic striped surfaces (consisting of alternating less and more wettable stripes) are investigated based on 3-D nonlinear simulations that…
The stability of liquid films coating the walls of a parallel-plate channel and sheared by a pressure-driven gas flow along the channel centre is studied. The films are susceptible to a long-wavelength instability, whose dynamic behaviour…
We demonstrate experimentally the existence of a purely elastic fingering instability which arises when air penetrates into an elastomer confined in a Hele-Shaw cell. Fingers appear sequentially and propagate within the bulk of the material…
A growing or compressed thin elastic sheet adhered to a rigid substrate can exhibit a buckling instability, forming an inward hump. Our study shows that the strip morphology depends on the delicate balance between the compression energy and…
We present a combined theoretical and experimental study of the buckling of a thin film wrapped around a sphere under the action of capillary forces. A rigid sphere is coated with a wetting liquid, and then wrapped by a thin film into an…
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…
A soap film, or a flexible membrane without bending and torsional stiffness, that is confined in a cylinder is shown to be susceptible to a surface-tension-driven instability when it is stretched or twisted. This leads to its breakdown and…
Liquids spreading over a solid substrate under the action of various forces are known to exhibit a long wavelength contact line instability. We use an example of thermally driven spreading on a horizontal surface to study how the stability…
Incremental stiffness characterizes the variation of a material's force response to a small deformation change. Typically materials have an incremental stiffness that is fixed and positive, but recent technologies, such as super-lenses, low…
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…
The effects of thermal coupling between two thin liquid layers, separated by a gas layer, are discussed. The liquid layers undergo long-wavelength instabilities driven by gravitational and thermocapillary stresses. To study the dynamics,…
Thermal effect is essential to regulate the interfacial instabilities for diverse technology applications. Here we report the fingering instability at the propagation front for a spreading liquid film subjected to the supercooling at the…
Spontaneous growth of long-wavelength deformations is a defining feature of active fluids with orientational order. We investigate the effect of biaxial rectangular confinement on the instability of initially shear-aligned 3D isotropic…
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…
Growth-induced instabilities are ubiquitous in biological systems and lead to diverse morphologies in the form of wrinkling, folding, and creasing. The current work focusses on the mechanics behind growth-induced wrinkling instabilities in…
Inspired by the observation that many naturally occurring adhesives arise as textured thin films, we consider the displacement controlled peeling of a flexible plate from an incision-patterned thin adhesive elastic layer. We find that crack…
Confinement can significantly alter fluid properties, offering potential for specific technological applications. However, achieving precise control over the structural complexity of confined fluids and soft matter remains challenging, as…
Crumpling of a thin film leads to a unique stiff yet lightweight structure. The stiffness has been attributed to a complex interplay between four basic elements - smooth bends, sharp folds, localized points (developable cones), and…
The known ground state of ultrathin smectic films confined to the surface of a sphere is described by four +1/2 defects assembled on a great circle and a director which follows geodesic lines. Using a simple perturbative approach we show…
Recent experimental and theoretical investigations of crystal growth from solution in the vicinity of an impermeable wall have shown that: (i) growth can be maintained within the contact region when a liquid film is present between the…