2017/04/06 by Anupam Pandey, Pandey, Anupam, Stefan Karpitschka +13
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Micro and Nano Robotics #Microfluidic and Bio-sensing Technologies #Pickering emulsions and particle stabilization #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1704.01820
openalex publication_date 2017/04/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recent experiments have shown that liquid drops on highly deformable substrates exhibit mutual interactions. This is similar to the Cheerios effect, the capillary interaction of solid particles at a liquid interface, but now the roles of solid and liquid are reversed. Here we present a dynamical theory for this inverted Cheerios effect, taking into account elasticity, capillarity and the viscoelastic rheology of the substrate. We compute the velocity at which droplets attract, or repel, as a function of their separation. The theory is compared to a simplified model in which the viscoelastic dissipation is treated as a localized force at the contact line. It is found that the two models differ only at small separation between the droplets, and both of them accurately describe experimental observations.