Drop & Fibre

Elastic beam coiling around a drop

Here we study the behaviors of a coupled system : an elastic beam on a drop. This is inspired by the super-extensible spider silk thanks to elasto-capillary interactions. Previous works have already proposed some models to the phenomenon.

In our 2D model, the drop is deformable. The problem is wrtten as a constrained optimisation problem and implemented in Python with CasADi. The video below showing the solution of a set of given material parameters. With different parameter values, the system behaves differently. Hysteresis can be observed.