Topology of desiccation crack patterns in clay and invariance of crack interface area with thickness
| Autor: | Sujata Tarafdar, Tajkera Khatun, Tapati Dutta |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: |
Surface (mathematics)
Materials science Euler number (physics) Resolution (electron density) Biophysics Surfaces and Interfaces General Chemistry engineering.material Topology Halloysite Cracking Substrate (building) symbols.namesake engineering Dissipative system symbols Clay General Materials Science Aluminum Silicates Desiccation Layer (electronics) Biotechnology |
| Zdroj: | The European physical journal. E, Soft matter. 38(8) |
| ISSN: | 1292-895X |
| Popis: | We study the crack patterns developed on desiccating films of suspensions of three different clays—bentonite, halloysite nanoclay and laponite on a glass substrate. Varying the thickness of the layer, h gives the following new and interesting results: i) We can identify a critical thickness h c for bentonite and halloysite, above which isolated cracks join each other to form a fully connected network. ii) A topological analysis involving the Euler number is shown to be useful for characterising the patterns. iii) We find, further, that the total vertical surface area of the clay A v, which has opened up due to cracking, and the total area of the glass substrate A s, exposed by the hierarchical sequence of cracks are constant, independent of the layer thickness for a certain range of h. These results are shown to be consistent with a simple energy conservation argument, neglecting dissipative losses. Finally we show that if the crack pattern is viewed at successively finer resolution, the total cumulative area of cracks visible at a certain resolution scales with the layer thickness. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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