Order-Disorder Structural Transitions in Mazes Built by Evaporating Drops

Pascal Panizza (1) , H. Algaba (1) , M. Postic (1) , Guillaume Raffy (1) , Laurent Courbin (1) , Franck Artzner (1)

1 IPR - Institut de Physique de Rennes

We show that the evaporation of surfactant solutions confined in quasi-two-dimensional porous media creates micron-sized labyrinthine patterns composing the walls of a centimeter-sized maze. These walls are made of solid deposits formed during drying via a sequence of individual Haines jumps occurring at the pore scale. We rationalize this process driven by simple iterative rules with a cellular automaton that acts as a maze generator. This model well describes the formation dynamics and final structure of an experimental maze as functions of the wettability heterogeneities of a porous medium and its geometry. Also, our findings unveil the crucial role of two geometric dimensionless quantities that control the structural order of a maze.

Domains: Physics [physics]

Pascal Panizza, H. Algaba, M. Postic, Guillaume Raffy, Laurent Courbin, et al.. Order-Disorder Structural Transitions in Mazes Built by Evaporating Drops. Physical Review Letters, 2018, 121 (7), pp.078002. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.078002⟩. ⟨hal-01879727⟩