Dynamic behaviour of multilamellar vesicles under Poiseuille flow

Shape diagram of vesicles in Poiseuille flow.

Soft bodies flowing in a channel often exhibit parachutelike shapes usually attributed to an increase of hydrodynamic constraint (viscous stress and/or confinement). We show that the presence of a fluid membrane leads to the reverse phenomenon and build a phase diagram of shapes-which are classified as bullet, croissant, and parachute-in channels of varying aspect ratio. Unexpectedly, shapes ar...

Deformability of multilamellar vesicles.

Although a free unilamellar vesicle has zero or almost zero genuine surface tension, the multilamellar vesicle ("onion") exhibits a nonzero effective surface tension sigma(eff). The expression for sigma(eff) used in the literature is sigma(eff) approximately square root of kappaB/d(0), where B is the interaction modulus between the vesicle bilayers, d(0) the repeating distance between the bilay...

Dynamic Behaviour of Piers Under Waves and Earthquakes

Dynamic Behaviour of Piers Under Waves and Earthquakes

Polyelectrolyte-induced peeling of charged multilamellar vesicles.

We study mixtures of charged surfactants, which alone in solution form uni- and multilamellar vesicles, and oppositely charged polyelectrolytes (PEs). The phase behavior is investigated at fixed surfactant concentration as a function of the PE-to-surfactant charge ratio, x. We find that, for x > 0, aggregates form. Light microscopy and X-ray scattering experiments show that the isoelectric poin...