Related papers: Microgels and fractal structures at interfaces and…
\textbf{Background} Hydrogels are crosslinked polymer networks that can absorb and retain a large fraction of liquid. Near a critical sliding velocity, hydrogels pressed against smooth surfaces exhibit time-dependent frictional behavior…
An increasing variety of crystal structures has been observed in soft condensed matter over the past two decades, surpassing most expectations for the diversity of arrangements accessible through classical driving forces. Here, we survey…
Brittle fracturing of materials is common in natural and industrial processes over a variety of length scales. Knowledge of individual particle dynamics is vital to obtain deeper insight into the atomistic processes governing crack…
Using Brownian dynamics simulations we study gel-forming colloid-polymer mixtures. The focus of this article lies on the differences of dense and dilute gel networks in terms of structure formation both on a local and a global level. We…
We investigate the collective behavior of suspended thermoresponsive microgels, that expel solvent and subsequently decrease in size upon heating. Using a binary mixture of differently thermoresponsive microgels, we demonstrate how…
We exploit the controlled drying of millimeter-sized gel beads to investigate isotropic compression of colloidal fractal gels. Using a custom dynamic light scattering setup, we demonstrate that stresses imposed by drying on the bead surface…
The compressive yield stress of particle gels shows a highly nonlinear dependence on the packing fraction. We have studied continuous compression processes, and discussed the packing fraction dependence with the particle scale…
The delicate balance between H-bonding and van der Waals interactions determine the stability,structure and chirality of many molecular and supramolecular aggregates weakly adsorbed on solid surfaces.Yet the inherent complexity of these…
Colloidal dispersions are prized as model systems to understand basic properties of materials, and are central to a wide range of industries from cosmetics to foods to agrichemicals. Among the key developments in using colloids to address…
Solid interfaces have intrinsic elasticity. However, in most experiments, this is obscured by bulk stresses. Through microscopic observations of the contact-line geometry of a partially wetting droplet on an anisotropically stretched…
It is widely known that hydrogels, a class of soft materials made of a polymer chain network, are prone to fatigue failure. To understand the underlying mechanism, here we simulate polymer scission and fatigue initiation in the vicinity of…
In this work, we present a mathematical model to describe the adsorption-diffusion process on fractal porous materials. This model is based on the fractal continuum approach and considers the scale-invariant properties of the surface and…
While crack nucleation and propagation in the brittle or quasi-brittle regime can be predicted via variational or material-force-based phase field fracture models, these models often assume that the underlying elastic response of the…
We report, for the first time, some experimental observations regarding a new type of long range interaction between rigid particles that prevails when they are suspended in an soft elastic gel. A denser particle submerges itself to a…
We study the existence of distinct failure regimes in a model for fracture in fibrous materials. We simulate a bundle of parallel fibers under uniaxial static load and observe two different failure regimes: a catastrophic and a slowly…
When strained beyond the linear regime, soft colloidal glasses yield to steady-state plastic flow in a way that is similar to the deformation of conventional amorphous solids. Due to the much larger size of the colloidal particles with…
Attractive colloidal gels exhibit solid-like behavior at vanishingly small fractions of solids, owing to ramified space-spanning networks that form due to particle-particle interactions. These networks give the gel its rigidity, and as the…
Two types of high-strength composite hydrogels possessing the structure of interpenetrating polymer networks were synthesized via free-radical polymerization of acrylamide carried out straight within the matrix of plant or bacterial…
A systematic fieldtheoretic description of critical adsorption on curved objects such as spherical or rodlike colloidal particles immersed in a fluid near criticality is presented. The temperature dependence of the corresponding order…
A microscopic density functional theory is used to investigate the adsorption of short chains on attractive solid surfaces. We analyze the structure of the adsorbed fluid and investigate how the wetting transition changes with the change of…