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Published on: February 26, 2014
Order-Disorder Structural Transitions in Mazes Built by Evaporating Drops
P Panizza1, H Algaba1, M Postic1
1Univ Rennes, CNRS, IPR (Institut de Physique de Rennes)-UMR 6251, F-35000 Rennes, France.
Abstract:
We show that the evaporation of surfactant solutions confined in quasi-two-dimensional porous media creates micron-sized labyrinthine patterns composing the walls of a centimeter-sized maze. These walls are made of solid deposits formed during drying via a sequence of individual Haines jumps occurring at the pore scale. We rationalize this process driven by simple iterative rules with a cellular automaton that acts as a maze generator. This model well describes the formation dynamics and final structure of an experimental maze as functions of the wettability heterogeneities of a porous medium and its geometry. Also, our findings unveil the crucial role of two geometric dimensionless quantities that control the structural order of a maze.
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