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Capillary micromechanics: measuring the elasticity of microscopic soft objects

journal contribution
posted on 2015-06-11, 13:33 authored by Hans M. Wyss, Thomas Franke, Elisa MeleElisa Mele, David A. Weitz
We present a simple method for accessing the elastic properties of microscopic deformable particles. This method is based on measuring the pressure-induced deformation of soft particles as they are forced through a tapered glass microcapillary. It allows us to determine both the compressive and the shear modulus of a deformable object in one single experiment. Measurements on a model system of poly-acrylamide microgel particles exhibit good agreement with measurements on bulk gels of identical composition. Our approach is applicable over a wide range of mechanical properties and should thus be a valuable tool for the characterization of a variety of soft and biological materials.

Funding

This work was supported in part by the NSF (DMR-0602684), the Harvard MRSEC (DMR-0820484), and by grants from Italy (FIRB project RBIN045NMB and the Apulia Regional Strategic Project PS144) and from Germany (Bayerische Forschungsstiftung and the German Excellence Initiative (NIM)).

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Materials

Published in

SOFT MATTER

Volume

6

Issue

18

Pages

4550 - 4555 (6)

Citation

WYSS, H.M. ... et al, 2010. Capillary micromechanics: measuring the elasticity of microscopic soft objects. Soft Matter, 6 (18), pp. 4550 - 4555.

Publisher

© Royal Society of Chemistry

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2010

Notes

This article is closed access.

ISSN

1744-683X

Language

  • en

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