Corners in soft solids behave as defects in crystals

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of corners in soft solids, revealing they act as defects similar to crystal dislocations, and clarifies the role of the Shuttleworth effect and elastowetting phenomena through analytical and numerical methods.

Contribution

It demonstrates that corners in soft solids behave as defects akin to crystal dislocations and clarifies the absence of a large Shuttleworth effect in elastomers using combined analytical and numerical approaches.

Findings

Corners in soft solids act as defect-like features.

No significant Shuttleworth effect in soft elastomers.

The Neumann construction does not apply in elastowetting.

Abstract

All phases of matter, solid, liquid or gas, present some excess energy, compared to their bulk, at their interfaces with other materials. This excess of energy, known as the surface energy, is a fundamental property of matter and is involved in virtually all interface problems in science, from the shape of bubbles, crystals and biological cells to the delicate motion of some insects on water or the fluttering of red blood cells. Because of their high cohesive internal energies, the surface energies of solids differ fundamentally from those of fluids and depend on the solid deformations. This effect, known as the Shuttleworth effect, is well established for metals but is highly debated for amorphous materials such as glasses, elastomers or biological tissues with recent experimental results yielding strictly opposite conclusions with regards to its very existence. Using a combination of analytical results and numerical simulations, we show in this paper that those seemingly opposite results can be reconciled due to the existence of an analog of the Peach-Koehler force acting on the elastocapillary ridge and conclude that: i) there is no large Shuttleworth effect in soft elastomers and ii) the Neumann construction does not hold in elastowetting.