An experimental biomimetic tongue-palate system has been developed to probe human in-mouth texture perception. Model tongues are made from soft elastomers patterned with fibrillar structures analogue to human filiform papillae. The palate is represented by a rigid flat plate parallel to the plane of the tongue. To probe the behavior under physiological flow conditions, deflections of model papillae are measured using a novel fluorescent imaging technique enabling sub-micrometer resolution of the displacements. Using optically transparent newtonian liquids under steady shear flow, we show that deformations of the papillae allow determining their viscosity from 1 Pa.s down to the viscosity of water of 1 mPa.s, in full quantitative agreement with a recently proposed model [Lauga et al., Frontiers in Physics, 2016, 4, 35]. The technique is further validated for a shear-thinning and optically opaque dairy system.
Vibrated granular materials have been intensively used to investigate particle segregation, convection, and heaping. We report on the behavior of a column of heavy grains bouncing on an oscillating solid surface. Measurements indicate that, for weak effects of the interstitial gas, the temporal variations of the pressure at the base of the column are satisfactorily described by considering that the column, despite the observed dilation, behaves like a porous solid. In addition, direct observation of the column dynamics shows that the grains of the upper and lower surfaces are in free fall in the gravitational field and that the dilation is due to a small delay between their takeoff times.
We report on the reptation of vertically vibrated droplets of fine particles lying on a solid incline. On the one hand, time-resolved measurements show that the gas pressure in the gap between the droplet bottom and the solid surface can be accounted for by a Darcy law. The cumulative effect of the viscous drag is responsible for the droplet formation. On the other hand, we show that the gap pressure is responsible for an effective horizontal acceleration whose cumulative effect is the upward reptation of the droplets. Using various geometries of the solid substrate, we manipulate the droplets and study the effects of the substrate geometry and of the experimental parameters on the droplet shape and dynamics. The experimental results are discussed in the light of theoretical arguments. This study demonstrates that, by the choice of a suitable geometry of the surface and characteristics of the vibration, one can develop tools for precise powder handling and control.
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