Driven soft matter at the nanoscale
[eng] This thesis will present a body of articles on the research topic of soft matter. Soft matter is a research subfield of condensed matter, where the energy required for deforming the media is comparable to that of thermal fluctuations. Tipical lengthscales of these systems are of the order of m...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2024 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/212304 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2445/212304 http://hdl.handle.net/10803/691246 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Matèria condensada tova Soft condensed matter |
| Sumario: | [eng] This thesis will present a body of articles on the research topic of soft matter. Soft matter is a research subfield of condensed matter, where the energy required for deforming the media is comparable to that of thermal fluctuations. Tipical lengthscales of these systems are of the order of micrometer (10^(-6) m) and the nanometer (10^(-6) m). It encompasses a broad range of topics, since in soft matter fluids, life and interacting matter meet. The complexity of the coupling between different interactions in soft matter can result in complex emergent responses and in a rich variety of laws that we need to understand if we want to control matter at the micro and nanoscales. In the last years, thanks to the rise of computational power, soft matter has progresively included more and more simulation methodologies to predict experimental results and pose new challenges for understanding complex behaviours at these scales. Here, the emphasis is put on the computational modelling of driven soft matter. We will present a compendium of publications, where different simulation methodologies are exploited for explaining experiments and for setting experimental challenges to be tested. We classify the presented works in two parts, the scientific approach of which differ notorously. In the first part, experiments were available and the objective was to understand emergent responses reported in the lab. Since the outcome was alreadyknown, we used simple simulation methodologies that delved into the fundamental mechanisms that lead to the response of interest. The focus of the subjects, althought diverse, was centered around dynamics of colloidal suspensions, hence a mixture of a majoritary liquid phase with a minoritary solid phase. In the second part of the thesis, we employed simulations that rigorously solved the hydrodynamics coupled to the physics of the free energy of interest. The goal was to investigate novel experimental setups, the outcome of which was unknown due to the early stage of the subject. With the simulation results, we built theories that explained the observed phenomena, setting the basis for future experimental explorations. This last part focused on two independent topics, namely, capillary driven spontaneous in lubricant infused surfaces and electrolites in charge-patterned confined nanochannels. |
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