Dear colleagues,I would like to draw your attention to the focus session  » Wetting and Adhesion of Soft Materials : Dynamics and Instability » at the upcoming APS March Meeting, March 2-6, Denver, CO. The invited speaker is Etienne Barthel, ESPCI Paris. A description of the scope of the session can be found at the end of this email.

Deadline for abstract submission is Friday, October 25, 2019. Abstracts can be submitted here.
To ensure placement in the correct session, you should select the focus session :02.01.02 Wetting and Adhesion of Soft Materials: Dynamics and Instability (DSOFT, DPOLY, GSNP) [same as 01.01.31, 03.01.44]
Please feel free to pass on this information to anyone who might be interested.
I am looking forward to seeing you in Denver!
Best regards,Julien

02.01.02 Wetting and Adhesion of Soft Materials: Dynamics and Instability (DSOFT, DPOLY, GSNP) [same as 01.01.31, 03.01.44]

The wetting and adhesion properties of soft materials are relevant for a wide range of applications including antibiofouling and hydro/omniphobic coatings, medical dressings, water harvesters, microfluidic and MEMS/NEMS devices. In many situations, the macroscopic properties crucially depend on the physical processes localized near a line (contact line, fracture, triple line, etc…) where the two materials and a liquid/gas phase meet. The adhesion of linear elastic solids and the wetting of Newtonian fluids on homogeneous hard substrates are two ideal cases that have been studied intensively, yielding models bridging macroscopic linear behavior with contact line dynamics. Yet, beyond these idealized cases, many open questions arise concerning the local dissipative processes operating in the dynamical regimes. 

New and exciting applications in wetting and adhesion rely heavily on the complex rheological properties of fluids and soft solids, mechanical behavior at large deformations, and surface patterning. In the regimes of interest, the triple line is subjected to complex dissipation mechanism either localized near the contact line through steady stade motion or through spontaneous and noise-induced instabilities (stick-slip, avalanches, cavitation, pearling) at a mescoscale. While many efforts have been made over the last few years to capture these phenomena, our understanding is still very limited. This focus session aims at bringing together experimentalists and theoreticians.

Organizer: Julien Chopin (julien.chopin@ufba.br); Julien Chopin (julien.chopin@ufba.br)