Imagine a layer of particles sitting at the interface between oil and water. Known as a granular raft, these particles can interact in interesting ways with other objects. Here, researchers experiment with allowing different shapes to fall through the raft. At slow speeds, the raft deforms to coat the object, even if it has a complex shape (top images). At higher insertion speeds, however, the granular raft can break up around the object. The lower sequence of images show a cylinder interacting with the raft. Moving from left to right, each image shows a larger cylinder diameter and an increasingly complex break-up of the raft. (Image credit: C. Gabbard et al.)
“Coat or Collapse?”
