Elastohydrodynamic lubrication, or simply soft lubrication, refers to the motion of deformable objects near a boundary lubricated by a fluid, and is one of the key physical mechanisms to minimise friction and wear in natural and engineered systems. Hence it is of particular interest to relate the thickness of the lubricant layer to the entrainment (sliding/rolling) velocity, the mechanical loading exerted onto the contacting elements, and properties of the elastic boundary. In this work we provide an overview of the various regimes of soft lubrication for two-dimensional cylinders in lubricated contact with compliant walls. We discuss the limits of small and large entrainment velocity, which is equivalent to large and small elastic deformations, as the cylinder moves near thick or thin elastic layers. The analysis focusses on thin elastic coatings, both compressible and incompressible, for which analytical scaling laws are not yet available in the regime of large deformations. By analysing the elastohydrodynamic boundary layers that appear at the edge of the contact, we establish the missing scaling laws - including prefactors. As such, we offer a rather complete overview of physically relevant limits of soft lubrication.
Lubrication flows appear in many applications in engineering, biophysics, and in nature. Separation of surfaces and minimisation of friction and wear is achieved when the lubrication fluid builds up a lift force. In this paper we analyse soft lubricated contacts by treating the solid walls as viscoelastic: soft materials are typically not purely elastic, but dissipate energy under dynamical loading conditions. We present a method for viscoelastic lubrication and focus on three canonical examples, namely Kelvin-Voigt-, Standard Linear-, and Power Law-rheology. It is shown how the solid viscoela…
Relative motion between soft wet solids arises in a number of applications in natural and artificial settings, and invariably couples elastic deformation and fluid flow. We explore this in a minimal setting by considering a fluid-immersed negatively-buoyant cylinder moving along a soft inclined wall. Our experiments show that there is an emergent robust steady-state sliding regime of the cylinder with an effective friction that is significantly reduced relative to that of rigid fluid-lubricated contacts. A simple scaling approach that couples the cylinder-induced flow to substrate deformation …
Deformation-induced lateral migration of a bubble slowly rising near a vertical plane wall in a stagnant liquid is numerically and theoretically investigated. In particular, our focus is set on a situation with a small clearance $c$ between the bubble interface and the wall. Motivated by the fact that experimentally measured migration velocity (Takemura et al. (2002, J. Fluid Mech. {\bf 461}, 277)) is higher than the velocity estimated by the available analytical solution (Magnaudet et al. (2003, J. Fluid Mech. {\bf 476}, 115)) using the Faxén mirror image technique for $κ(=a/(a+c))\ll 1$ (her…
We develop a one-dimensional model for the unsteady fluid--structure interaction (FSI) between a soft-walled microchannel and viscous fluid flow within it. A beam equation, which accounts for both transverse bending rigidity and nonlinear axial tension, is coupled to a one-dimensional fluid model obtained from depth-averaging the two-dimensional incompressible Navier--Stokes equations across the channel height. Specifically, the Navier--Stokes equations are scaled in the viscous lubrication limit relevant to microfluidics. The resulting set of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations i…
We describe an immersed boundary method in which the fluid-structure coupling is achieved in an Eulerian framework. The method is an improved extension of the immersed boundary method originally developed by Kajishima et al. [1], which accounts for the inertia of the fictitious fluid inside the particle volume and is thus able to reproduce the behaviour of particles both in the case of neutrally-buoyant objects and in the presence of density difference between the particles and the fluid. The method is capable to handle the presence of multiple suspended objects, i.e., a suspension, by includi…
The ability to create dynamic deformations of micron-sized structures is relevant to a wide variety of applications such as adaptable optics, soft robotics, and reconfigurable microfluidic devices. In this work we examine non-uniform lubrication flow as a mechanism to create complex deformation fields in an elastic plate. We consider a Kirchoff-Love elasticity model for the plate and Hele-Shaw flow in a narrow gap between the plate and a parallel rigid surface. Based on linearization of the Reynolds equation, we obtain a governing equation which relates elastic deformations to gradients in non…
Gravitational settling of a droplet in air onto a soft substrate is a ubiquitous event relevant to many natural processes and engineering applications. We study this phenomenon by developing a three-phase lubrication model of droplet settling onto a solid substrate coated by a thin soft layer represented by a viscous film, an elastic compressible layer and an elastic sheet supported by a viscous film. By combining scaling analysis, analytical methods, and numerical simulations we elucidate how the resulting droplet dynamics is affected by the nature of the soft layer. We show that these soft l…
Lubrication forces depend to a high degree on elasticity, texture, charge, chemistry, and temperature of the interacting surfaces. Therefore, by appropriately designing surface properties, we may tailor lubrication forces to reduce friction, adhesion and wear between sliding surfaces or control repulsion, assembly, and collision of interacting particles. Here, we show that variations of slippage on one of the contacting surfaces induce a lift force. We demonstrate the consequences of this force on the mobility of a cylinder traveling near a wall and show the emergence of particle oscillation a…
This work proposes a novel model and numerical formulation for lubricated contact problems describing the mutual interaction between two deformable 3D solid bodies and an interposed fluid film. The solid bodies are consistently described based on nonlinear continuum mechanics allowing for finite deformations and arbitrary constitutive laws. The fluid film is modelled as a quasi-2D flow problem on the interface between the solids governed by the averaged Reynolds equation. The averaged Reynolds equation accounts for surface roughness utilizing spatially homogenized, effective fluid parameters a…
Motion of an object near a soft wall with intervening fluid is a canonical problem in elastohydrodynamics, finding presence in subjects spanning biology to tribology. Particularly, motion of a sphere towards a soft substrate with intervening fluid is often encountered in the context of scanning probe microscopy. While there have been fundamental theoretical studies on this setup, they have focussed on specific applications and thus enforced suitable simplifications. Here we present a versatile semi-analytical framework for studying the elastohydrodynamics of axisymmetric loading of a rigid sph…
We consider the motion of a fluid-immersed negatively buoyant particle in the vicinity of a thin compressible elastic wall, a situation that arises in a variety of technological and natural settings. We use scaling arguments to establish different regimes of sliding, and complement these estimates using thin-film lubrication dynamics to determine an asymptotic theory for the sedimentation, sliding, and spinning motions of a cylinder. The resulting theory takes the form of three coupled nonlinear singular-differential equations. Numerical integration of the resulting equations confirms our scal…
We present the first direct measurement of the elastohydrodynamic lift force acting on a sphere moving within a viscous liquid, near and along a soft substrate under nanometric confinement. Using atomic force microscopy, the lift force is probed as a function of the gap size, for various driving velocities, viscosities, and stiffnesses. The force increases as the gap is reduced and shows a saturation at small gap. The results are in excellent agreement with scaling arguments and a quantitative model developed from the soft lubrication theory, in linear elasticity, and for small compliances. Fo…
It is known that an object translating parallel to a soft wall in a viscous fluid produces hydro- dynamic stresses that deform the wall, which, in turn, results in a lift force on the object. Recent experiments with cylinders sliding under gravity near a soft incline, which confirmed theoretical arguments for the lift force, also reported an unexplained steady-state rotation of the cylinders [Saintyves et al. PNAS 113(21), 2016]. Motivated by these observations, we show, in the lubrication limit, that an infinite cylinder that translates in a viscous fluid parallel to a soft wall at constant s…
The capture of a soft spherical particle by a rectangular slit leads to a non-monotonic pressure-flow rate relation at low Reynolds number. In the presence of the trapped particle the flow-induced deformations focus the streamlines and pressure drop to a small region. This increases the resistance to flow by several orders of magnitude as the driving pressure is increased. As a result two regimes are observed: a flow-dominated regime for small particle deformations, where flow rate increases with pressure, and an elastic-dominated regime in which solid deformations block the flow.
