Videos extract mechanical properties of liquid-gel ...( Blood coursing through vessels lubri...)

Blood coursing through vessels, lubricated cartilage sliding against joints, ink jets splashing on paperliving and nonliving things abound with fluids meeting solids. However important these liquid/solid boundaries may be, conventional methods cannot measure basic mechanical properties of these interfaces in their natural environments. Now, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Minnesota have demonstrated a video method that eventually may be able to make measurements on these types of biological and industrial systems.*

Optical microrheologyan emerging tool for studying flow in small samplesusually relies on heat to stir up motion. Analyzing this heat-induced movement can provide the information needed to determine important mechanical properties of fluids and the interfaces that fluids form with other materials. However, when strong flows overwhelm heat-based motion, this method isn't applicable.

Motivated by this, researchers developed a video method that can extract optically basic properties of the liquid/solid interface in strong flows. The solid material they chose was a gel, a substance that has both solid-like properties such as elasticity and liquid-like properties such as viscosity (resistance to flow).

In between a pair of centimeter-scale circular plates, the researchers deposited a gel of polydimethylsiloxane (a common material used in contact lenses and microfluidics devices). Pouring a liquid solution of polypropylene glycol on the gel, they then rotated the top plate to create forces at the liquid/gel interface. The results could be observed by tracking the motion of styrene beads in the gel.

The researchers discovered that the boundary between the liquid and gel became unstable in response to mechanical noise (irregularities in the motion of the plates). Such noise occurs in real-world physical systems. Surprisingly, a small amount of this mechanical
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