Morphometric analysis of polygonal cracking patterns in desiccated starch slurries

Abstract

We investigate the geometry of two-dimensional polygonal cracking that forms on the air-exposed surface of dried starch slurries. Two different kinds of starches, made from potato and corn, exhibited distinguished crack evolution, and there were contrasting effects of slurry thickness on the probability distribution of the polygonal cell area. The experimental findings are believed to result from the difference in the shape and size of starch grains, which strongly influence the capillary transport of water and tensile stress field that drives the polygonal cracking.

arXiv commentPhys. Rev. E (2017) in press; 11 pages, 11 figures

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Universal Scaling of Polygonal Desiccation Crack Patterns
• Flow velocity-dependent transition of anisotropic crack patterns in CaCO${}_3$ pastes
• Universal fluctuation of polygonal crack geometry in solidified lava
• Empirical rule of fruit rind fragmentation in muskmelon netting
• Experimental investigations on the nonequilibrium dynamics of pattern formation in fluid and granular systems
• Algorithms for generating planar networks simulating hierarchical patterns of cracks formed during film drying
• Fragment size density estimator for shrinkage-induced fracture based on a physics-informed neural network