Phenomenological model of crack patterns in thin colloidal films undergoing desiccation

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of Voronoi diagrams in modeling crack patterns in desiccating colloidal films, proposing a phenomenological model that better captures real-world features, especially topological aspects.

Contribution

It introduces a new phenomenological model that improves upon Voronoi diagrams in representing crack patterns in thin colloidal films during desiccation.

Findings

Voronoi diagrams partially model crack structures

Topological features are better captured than geometric ones

The proposed model aligns more closely with observed crack patterns

Abstract

A number of geometric and topological properties of samples of crack-template based conductive films are examined to assess the degree to which Voronoi diagrams can successfully model structure and conductivity in such networks. Our analysis suggests that although Poisson--Voronoi diagrams are only partially successful in modeling structural features of real-world crack patterns formed in films undergoing desiccation, such diagrams can nevertheless be useful in situations where topological characteristics are more important than geometric ones. A phenomenological model is proposed that is more accurate at capturing features of the real-world crack patterns.