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Stresses in thin sheets at fluid interfaces

Nature Materials volume 19, pages 690–693 (2020)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 23 April 2020

This article has been updated

To the editor — The mechanical response of thin films and filaments at fluid interfaces is affected by elastocapillary stresses. We aim to clarify the role of the solid–fluid interfacial energy in such situations by showing that it affects the thermodynamic distribution of stresses within the solid body but not the mechanical response of the thin film to external forces.

Molecules at the surface of a condensed phase experience asymmetric interactions, giving rise to an excess energy relative to the bulk. For liquids at thermodynamic equilibrium, this leads to a decreased density near the surface, and hence an isotropic tensile stress (force per unit length) on surface molecules that is numerically equal to the surface energy (energy per unit area)1. Both at the surface and in the bulk, solids differ fundamentally from liquids in having a finite shear rigidity due to preferred spatial arrangements of particles whose relative distances determine a ‘target metric’ and corresponding stress-free configurations. Hence, when a solid is placed in contact with a liquid or vapour, its molecules do not flow, but are displaced from their preferred relative distances, which may give rise to strain. The consequent stress induced in the solid by the solid–fluid interaction has been the subject of differing points of view in the literature2,3,4,5,6, which we seek to clarify in this Correspondence. Here we focus on the illustrative example of the stress in a thin, flexible solid at a fluid interface.

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Fig. 1: Measuring the stress in a thin film at a fluid interface.
Fig. 2: Measured meniscus profiles.
Fig. 3: Gedankenexperiment.

Data availability

Source data for Fig. 2 are provided with the paper. All remaining data are available from the authors upon request.

Change history

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge financial support through the Keck Foundation, NSF-DMR 1507650, 1905698 (NM), NSF-CAREER DMR 1151780 (D.K., B.D.), NSF-DMR 1822439 (B.D.), and the Army Research Office under W911NF-17-1-0003 (T.P.R.). We thank J. D. Paulsen for useful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

    Deepak Kumar, Benny Davidovitch & Narayanan Menon

  2. Polymer Science and Engineering Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

    Deepak Kumar & Thomas P. Russell

  3. Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India

    Deepak Kumar

  4. Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Thomas P. Russell

  5. Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Soft Matter Science and Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing, China

    Thomas P. Russell

  6. Advanced Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan

    Thomas P. Russell

Authors
  1. Deepak Kumar
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Contributions

D.K., T.P.R., B.D. and N.M. contributed to the overall concept of the study. D.K. and N.M. contributed to experimental design. D.K. took the data. D.K., B.D. and N.M. contributed to data analysis. B.D. conceived the gedankenexperiment in Fig. 3. All authors contributed to writing and editing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Narayanan Menon.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 2.

Measured menisci profiles for film-covered and bare water surfaces.

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Kumar, D., Russell, T.P., Davidovitch, B. et al. Stresses in thin sheets at fluid interfaces. Nat. Mater. 19, 690–693 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-020-0640-9

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