| | |
Summary: Dynamics of Surfactant-Driven Fracture of Particle Rafts
Dominic Vella,1,2
Ho-Young Kim,1,3
Pascale Aussillous,2
and L. Mahadevan1,*
1
Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Pierce Hall,
29 Oxford Street, Cambridge Massachusetts 02138, USA
2
ITG, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge,
Wilberforce Road, Cambridge, CB3 0WA, United Kingdom
3
School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-744, Korea
(Received 27 September 2005; published 3 May 2006)
We investigate the dynamic fracture of a close-packed monolayer of particles, or particle raft, floating at
a liquid-gas interface induced by the localized addition of surfactant. Unusually for a two-dimensional
solid, our experiments show that the speed of crack propagation here is not affected by the elastic
properties of the raft. Instead it is controlled by the rate at which surfactant is advected to the crack tip by
means of the induced Marangoni flows. Further, the velocity of propagation is not constant in time and the
length of the crack scales as t3=4
|
