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A remarkable property of cellulose-based materials is that they can absorb huge amounts of water (25% of the dry mass) from ambient vapor, in the form of bound water confined at a nanoscale in the amorphous regions of the cellulose structure. The control of the dynamics of sorption and desorption of bound water is a […]

Coarsening is a ubiquitous phenomenon in phase separations. It is widely observed in alloys, polymers, emulsions, foams, and even in biological systems. However, coarsening of materials where the two phases have comparable volume fractions is still poorly understood. To fill this gap, we performed coarsening experiments on aqueous foams in microgravity—free from gravity-driven destabilization. We […]

Multi-phase flows, encountered in nature or in industry, exhibit non-trivial rheological properties, that we attempt to better understand thanks to model materials and appropriate rheometers. Unsaturated wet granular flows down a rough inclined plane turn out to be steady and uniform for a wide range of parameters, despite the cohesion and the grain aggregates. The […]

3D printing of yield stress fluids (i.e., materials able to flow like liquids only beyond a critical stress) is opening new doors in the fields of construction, food or medicine. The usual printing technique consists to extrude and then deposit a filament of yield stress fluid onto the previous layer. One major difficulty is that, […]