Soft-matter morphodynamics: from interfacial instabilities to elastic structures

The surge of modern techniques to fabricate structured materials poses great challenges to existing manufacturing paradigms. Fluid mechanics has the potential to dramatically impact this segment, particularly through the directed control of interfacial instabilities. We show that the destabilization of a liquid interface into a pattern forming instability may be harnessed to fabricate complicated hierarchical and topological soft elastic structures. We use elastomeric mixtures that are initially liquid and cure in finite time thereby freezing the instability-mediated structures. We study the morphodynamics of this process, that is the link between the pattern growth and its morphology. We propose a possible pathway to solve the inverse problem: designing the optimal set of initial conditions and interactions that will be transmuted into a target shape without direct external intervention.