A liquid surface touching a solid usually deforms in a near-wall meniscus region. In this work, we replace part of the free surface with a soft polymer and examine the shape of this elasto-capillary meniscus, result of the interplay between elasticit
y, capillarity and hydrostatic pressure. We focus particularly on the extraction threshold for the soft object. Indeed, we demonstrate both experimentally and theoretically the existence of a limit height of liquid tenable before breakdown of the compound, and extraction of the object. Such an extraction force is known since Laplace and Gay-Lussac, but only in the context of rigid floating objects. We revisit this classical problem by adding the elastic ingredient and predict the extraction force in terms of the strip elastic properties. It is finally shown that the critical force can be increased with elasticity, as is commonplace in adhesion phenomena
An elastic sheet lying on the surface of a liquid, if axially compressed, shows a transition from a smooth sinusoidal pattern to a well localized fold. This wrinkle-to-fold transition is a manifestation of a localized buckling. The symmetric and anti
symmetric shapes of the fold have recently been described by Diamant and Witten (2011), who found two exact solutions of the nonlinear equilibrium equations. In this Note, we show that these solutions can be generalized to a continuous family of solutions, which yields non symmetric shapes of the fold. We prove that non symmetric solutions also describe the shape of a soft strip withdrawn from a liquid bath, a physical problem that allows to easily observe portions of non symmetric profiles.
