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Capillary forces acting at the interfaces of soft materials lead to deformations over the scale of the elastocapillary length. When surface stresses exceed a material's yield stress, a plastocapillary effect is expected to arise, resulting in yielding and plastic deformation. Here, we explore the interfacial instabilities of 3D-printed fluid and elastic beams embedded within viscoelastic fluids and elastic solid support materials. Interfacial instabilities are driven by the immiscibility between the paired phases or their solvents. We find that the stability of an embedded structure is predicted from the balance between the yield stress of the elastic solid, τ y , the apparent interfacial tension between the materials, γ ′, and the radius of the beam, r , such that τ y > γ ′/ r . When the capillary forces are sufficiently large, we observe yielding and failure of the 3D printed beams. Furthermore, we observe new coiling and buckling instabilities emerging when elastic beams are embedded within viscous fluid support materials. The coiling behavior appear analogous to elastic rope coiling whereas the buckling instability follows the scaling behavior predicted from Euler–Bernoulli beam theory.
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Emerging Design Tools for Functional Architectures in Monofilament Fibers
The structural control of the monofilament fiber cross‐sectional architecture is a well‐established method for imparting its active functionality. Resulting from a thermal draw, the fiber device, until recently, is expected to be a cross‐sectionally scaled‐down and axially scaled‐up replica of its preform. However, thermal draw is a melt‐shaping process in which the preform is heated to a viscous liquid to be scaled into a fiber. Thus, it is prone to capillary instabilities on the interfaces between preform cladding and materials it encapsulates, distorting the fiber‐embedded architecture and complicating preform‐to‐fiber geometry translation. Traditionally, capillary instabilities are suppressed by performing the draw at a high‐viscosity, large‐feature‐size regime, such that the scaling of the preform into the fiber happens faster than a pronounced instability can develop. It is discovered recently that highly nonlinear, at times even chaotic capillary instabilities, in some fluid dynamic regimes, become predictable and thus engineerable. Driven by ever‐growing demand for enhancing the fiber‐device functionality, piggybacking on a capillary instability, instead of suppressing it, establishes itself as a new material processing strategy to achieve fiber‐embedded systems with user‐engineered architecture in all 3D, including the axial. Considering this development, the notable emerging methodologies are cross‐compared for designing 3D fiber‐embedded architectures.
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- PAR ID:
- 10639905
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Advanced Engineering Materials
- Volume:
- 26
- Issue:
- 23
- ISSN:
- 1438-1656
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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