Expansive clay is one of the most widely distributed soils in world. Due to its rich content strongly hydrophilic minerals—such as montmorillonite—expansive exhibits substantial swelling and shrinkage properties, overconsolidation. The formation process undisturbed expansive has a long complicated geological history innumerable drying–wetting cycles, resulting special internal structures. In th...

Motivated by the puzzle of sorption hysteresis in Portland cement concrete or cement paste, we develop in Part II of this study a general theory of vapor sorption and desorption from nanoporous solids, which attributes hysteresis to hindered molecular condensation with attractive lateral interactions. The classical mean-field theory of van der Waals is applied to predict the dependence of hyste...

An important feature of biological systems is their response to external stimuli with subsequent changes in properties and function. The ability to ‘‘engineer’’ adaptiveness into next-generation materials is becoming a key requirement and challenge in chemistry, materials science and engineering. Recently we have described new hybrid nano/microstructures capable of dynamic actuation by a hydrog...

Richards’ equation and the two-phase flow equations are well-known degenerate parabolic models of air/water flow in porous media. Poor iterative solver performance and small time steps during transient simulations are often reported in field-scale simulations. In this work we study Newton-multigrid and nonlinear multigrid methods applied to discrete air/water flow models. The models are discret...

This paper presents a new physically-based method for predicting natural hairstyles in the presence of gravity and collisions. The method is based upon a mechanically accurate model for static elastic rods (Kirchhoff model), which accounts for the natural curliness of hair, as well as for hair ellipticity. The equilibrium shape is computed in a stable and easy way by energy minimization. This y...

The wetting of a surface by liquid is crucial part many natural and industrial processes. Despite numerous existing studies, some elements wetting-drying such as contact angle variation during flow, are still poorly understood, yet it piece information needed for modeling fluid displacements in capillary-dominated flows. In the context multi-phase flow porous media, scarcity direct measurements...

We report a new methyltrimethoxysilane (MTMS) based route to growing a Janus silica film at the oil–water interface, which upon drying shows anisotropic wetting by water on its two surfaces. The contact angle of water on the surface grown in contact with the oil-side is found to be 150 , but it is much smaller, 65 , on the side which grew in contact with the aqueous phase. This large difference...

As plant roots take up water and the soil dries, water depletion is expected to occur in the vicinity of roots, the so called rhizosphere. However, recent experiments showed that the rhizosphere of lupines was wetter than the bulk soil during the drying period. Surprisingly, the rhizosphere remained temporarily dry after irrigation. Such water dynamics in the rhizosphere can be explained by the...