RESUMO
Aluminum soaps are notable for their ability to form soap-hydrocarbon gels of high viscosity. For more than half a century, it has been believed that the gelling mechanism is due to a formation of polymeric chains of aluminum molecules with the aluminum atoms linking along the axis and with the fatty acid chain extended sideways. Here we report results from an investigation using high-resolution electron microscopy and rheology measurements that clearly resolve the ambiguity. Our results reveal that the gelling mechanism stems from the formation of spherical nano-sized micelles from aluminum soap molecules, and those colloidal micelle particles then aggregate into networks of highly fractal and jammed structures. The earlier proposed polymer chain-like structure is definitely incorrect. The discovery of aluminum soap particles could expand application of these materials to new technologies.
RESUMO
Stiff thin films on soft substrates are both ancient and commonplace in nature; for instance, animal skin comprises a stiff epidermis attached to a soft dermis. Although more recent and rare, artificial skins are increasingly used in a broad range of applications, including flexible electronics, tunable diffraction gratings, force spectroscopy in cells, modern metrology methods, and other devices. Here we show that model elastomeric artificial skins wrinkle in a hierarchical pattern consisting of self-similar buckles extending over five orders of magnitude in length scale, ranging from a few nanometres to a few millimetres. We provide a mechanism for the formation of this hierarchical wrinkling pattern, and quantify our experimental findings with both computations and a simple scaling theory. This allows us to harness the substrates for applications. In particular, we show how to use the multigeneration-wrinkled substrate for separating particles based on their size, while simultaneously forming linear chains of monodisperse particles.
