Surface elastic constants of a soft solid
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Updated: Feb 15, 2026

Surface Properties of Synthesized Nanoporous Carbon and Silica Matrices
Published on: March 27, 2019
Qin Xu1, Robert W Style1, Eric R Dufresne1
1Department of Materials, ETH Zürich, 8093 Zürich, Switzerland. eric.dufresne@mat.ethz.ch.
Abstract:
Solid interfaces have intrinsic elasticity. However, in most experiments, this is obscured by bulk stresses. Through microscopic observations of the contact-line geometry of a partially wetting droplet on an anisotropically stretched substrate, we measure two surface-elastic constants that quantify the linear dependence of the surface stress of a soft polymer gel on its strain. With these two parameters, one can predict surface stresses for general deformations of the material in the linear-elastic limit.
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