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Elastocapillary coalescence: Aggregation and fragmentation with a maximal size

Arezki Boudaoud^*

José Bico^† and Benoît Roman^‡

Laboratoire de Physique Statistique, UMR 8550 du CNRS/ENS/Paris 6/Paris 7, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris Cedex 5, France

Physique et Mécanique des Milieux Hétérogènes UMR 7636 du CNRS/ESPCI/Paris 6/Paris 7, 10, rue Vauquelin, 75231 Paris Cedex 5, France

^*URL: http://www.lps.ens.fr/∼boudaoud
^†jbico@pmmh.espci.fr
^‡benoit@pmmh.espci.fr

Phys. Rev. E 76, 060102(R) – Published 12 December, 2007

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.76.060102

Abstract

Aggregation processes generally lead to broad distributions of sizes involving exponential tails. Here, experiments on the capillary-driven coalescence of regularly spaced flexible structures yields a self-similar distribution of sizes with no tail. At a given step, the physical process imposes a maximal size for the aggregates, which appears as the relevant scale for the distribution. A simple toy model involving the aggregation of nearest neighbors exhibits the same statistics. A mean-field theory accounting for a maximal size is in agreement with both experiments and numerics. This approach is extended to iterative fragmentation processes where the largest object is broken at each step.

Article Text

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