Hydrated gels are very slippery, and we now know it’s partly due to their surfaces! Chris made composite hydrogels with a soft surface skin, then fully characterized the effective stiffness of that layer, contact mechanics, and how it contributes to good lubrication (or not!) He did an impressively-large number of experiments involving materials synthesis, careful […]
Tag: gradient
New paper out: Hydrogel surfaces are softer than you think! Published in Experimental Mechanics
Hydrogels are inherently slippery — we know this from touching jello and sliding on banana peels. It’s been shown in many of our prior publications, as well as publications from the Sawyer group (University of Florida), the Spencer group (ETH), the tribology group at Imperial College, and many others. However, making polyacrylamide hydrogels in the […]