It has been recently reported that in presence of low Reynolds number (Re<<1) transport, preformed bacterial biofilms, several hours after their formation, may degenerate in form of filamentous structures, known as streamers. In this letter, we expla
in that such streamers form as the highly viscous liquid states of the intrinsically viscoelastic biofilms. Such viscous liquid state can be hypothesized by noting that the time of appearance of the streamers is substantially larger than the viscoelastic relaxation time scale of the biofilms, and this appearance is explained by the inability of a viscous liquid to withstand an external shear. Further, by identifying the post formation dynamics of the streamers as that of a viscous liquid jet in a surrounding flow field, we can interpret several unexplained issues associated with the post-formation dynamics of streamers, such as the clogging of the flow passage or the exponential time growth of streamer dimensions.
The contact angle that a liquid drop makes on a soft substrate does not obey the classical Youngs relation, since the solid is deformed elastically by the action of the capillary forces. The finite elasticity of the solid also renders the contact ang
les different from that predicted by Neumanns law, which applies when the drop is floating on another liquid. Here we derive an elasto-capillary model for contact angles on a soft solid, by coupling a mean-field model for the molecular interactions to elasticity. We demonstrate that the limit of vanishing elastic modulus yields Neumanns law or a slight variation thereof, depending on the force transmission in the solid surface layer. The change in contact angle from the rigid limit (Young) to the soft limit (Neumann) appears when the length scale defined by the ratio of surface tension to elastic modulus $gamma/E$ reaches a few molecular sizes.
