Soft Matter in Home and Kitchen Appliances

Soft matter physics provides a unifying framework for many challenges encountered in the kitchen and home appliance industry, where deformable materials, complex fluids, interfaces, and fracture processes directly shape product performance and user experience. Drawing on examples from R&D at SharkNinja, this talk will highlight how foams, suspensions, or food materials inform the design of everyday appliances, from cleaning technologies to food processing and cutting mechanics. In the second half, the talk will focus on a recent study of onion cutting as a model soft matter fracture problem. We show that cutting onions generates tear-inducing aerosol droplets through a two-stage process involving pressurized cell rupture and ligament breakup, with ejection velocities reaching up to 40m/s. The results demonstrate how blade sharpness and cutting dynamics strongly influence droplet emission, offering both a mechanistic understanding of a familiar kitchen phenomenon and practical insights relevant to food preparation, safety, and appliance design.