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Measured Capillary Forces On Spheres At Liquid Interfaces And The Mechanics Of Interfacial Particulate Assemblies, Wei He

Doctoral Dissertations

Particle-laden interfaces have promising potentials in many fields because the particulate nature can endow the surface with physical properties that are not readily obtained from molecular-scale surfactants. In this dissertation, we first focus on measuring capillary forces on particles at fluid interfaces in order to assess the key parameters that yield effective stabilizing particles. In experiment, the force and the displacement of a millimeter-scale particle passing through a liquid interface were recorded. We find that the peak force needed to detach a particle from an interface crowded with other particles is consistently smaller than the force at a clean interface. …