Soil liquefaction has been observed worldwide during recent major earthquakes with induced effects responsible for much of the damage, disruption of function, and considerable replacement expenses for structures. The phenomenon has not been documented in recent time with such damage in Italian context before the recent Emilia-Romagna Earthquake (May 2012). The main lateral spreading and vertica...

We conducted a combined experimental and numerical study of the spreading of insoluble surfactants on spatially confined thin liquid films. We found that the spreading dynamics can locally be represented by a power-law relation x∼t(α). We determine the time evolution of the liquid film thickness and the corresponding spreading exponents α both from experiments using interference microscopy and ...

We introduce and analyze a model for osmotically spreading bacterial colonies at solid-air interfaces that includes wetting phenomena, i.e., surface forces. The model is based on a hydrodynamic description for liquid suspensions which is supplemented by bioactive processes. We show that surface forces determine whether a biofilm can expand laterally over a substrate and provide experimental evi...