Annular cracks in thin films of nanoparticle suspensions drying on a fiber

Abstract

We report an experimental study of the crack pattern formed during the drying of a colloidal suspension. A horizontal fiber, which provides a one dimensional, boundary-free substrate, is coated by a film of micronic thickness. The geometry imposes a remarkable annular crack pattern and allowing precise measurements of the crack spacing over a short range of film thickness (between 2 and 10 $\mu$m) which varies linearly with the film height. We compare our experimental data with a model proposed by Kitsunezaki which suggests that the variation of the crack spacing with the film thickness depends on the ratio between a critical stress at cracking and a critical stress for slipping on the substrate. By measuring the friction force of the colloidal gels on a hydrophobic surface through a cantilever technique, we can deduce the critical crack stress for these colloidal gels simply by measuring the crack spacing of the pattern.

Accepted in EPL

References in corpus (1)

• Effect of a non-volatile cosolvent on crack pattern induced by desiccation of a colloidal gel

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Universal Scaling of Polygonal Desiccation Crack Patterns
• Mechanical tuning of the evaporation rate of liquid on crossed fibers
• Tearing of thin sheets: Cracks interacting through an elastic ridge
• Evaporation of liquid coating a fiber
• Experimental investigations on the nonequilibrium dynamics of pattern formation in fluid and granular systems