Fluid-structure interaction and wetting of soft polymer substrates

At the Leibniz MMS Days 2025 at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research (IOW) in Warnemünde, this joint work on the equilibrium shapes of liquid polystyrene (PS) droplets on soft viscoelastic PDMS substrates was presented. Combining high-resolution atomic force microscopy with axisymmetric sharp-interface modeling, it was investigated how substrate elasticity and droplet size influence droplet morphology. The comparison showed systematic deviations, for which a qualitative explanation is provided using poroelastic models. This is joint work with André Erhardt, Leonie Schmeller, and Barbara Wagner (WIAS Berlin), and Ralf Seemann and Khalil Remini (University of Saarland).