Coiling a fiber inside a drop provides a highly stretchable device

Abstract eng:
Capillary forces acting at the surface of a liquid drop can be strong enough to deform small objects and recent studies have provided several examples of elastic instabilities induced by surface tension. We present such an example where a liquid drop sits on a straight fiber and we show that the liquid attracts the fiber which thereby coils inside the drop. We model the system behavior as a phase transition between a stretched phase, where the drop sits on a straight fiber, and a condensed phase, where the fiber is coiled inside the drop. The force-plateau regime during the transition between the two phases is seen as a Maxwell line, reminiscent of the Martensite-Austenite transition in Shape Memory Alloys.

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