Publications

Stabilizing layers of colloidal dispersions or emulsions to obtain homogeneous films is a real challenge. We describe here a new kind of instability in drying films of emulsions: during evaporation of the internal phase, cracks appear between the droplets that create aggregates according to a regular pattern. We show that this pattern only appears if the emulsion is adhesive, i.e., if droplets stick together. The pattern exhibits a characteristic length which depends on the adhesion strength and film thickness. These experimental results support a model where this instability is due to the gel structure and elastic properties of adhesive emulsions. Understanding this phenomenon will allow us to get a homogeneous film or to control it to get structured materials.

https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.langmuir.1c00246

Aluminium salts such as aluminium chlorohydrate (ACH) are the active ingredients of antiperspirant products. Their mechanism of action involves a temporary and superfcial plugging of eccrine sweat pores at the skin surface. We developed a microfuidic system that allows the real time observation of the interactions between sweat and ACH in conditions mimicking physiological sweat fow and pore dimensions. Using artifcial sweat containing bovine serum albumin as a model protein, we performed experiments under fowing conditions to demonstrate that pore clogging results from the aggregation of proteins by aluminium polycations at specifc location in the sweat pore. Combining microfuidic experiments, confocal microscopy and numerical models helps to better understand the physical chemistry and mechanisms involved in pore plugging. The results show that plugging starts from the walls of sweat pores before expanding into the centre of the channel. The simulations aid in explaining the infuence of ACH concentration as well as the impact of fow conditions on the localization of the plug. Altogether, these results outline the potential of both microfuidic confocal observations and numerical simulations at the single sweat pore level to understand why aluminium polycations are so efcient for sweat channel plugging.

Completing a Swiss-cheese theorem of Lieb and Lebowitz (LL), we prove that any population of spheres with power-law radius distribution can completely fill 3D Euclidean space if the exponent is such that 2.8 ≤ d_f < 3. This sufficient condition extends considerably the known part of the ensemble of space-filling populations of polydisperse spheres. The self-similar spatial arrangement of the polydisperse spheres related to the theorem is discussed using a numerical example with d_f = 2.875. By calculating the small-angle scattering structure factor of the resulting packing, we found it to present several crystalline peaks indicating some regularity. This is significantly different from the featureless structure factor of an Apollonian packing which represents total disorder. We thereby argue that the LL algorithm for filling space with spheres is fundamentally different from Apollonian constructions.