We present a study of crack patterns in a layer of laponite gel allowed to dry in a static electric field. Crack patterns in natural and synthetic clays have been studied extensively with interesting results. Since clay platelets have a surface charge in aqueous solution, it is natural to expect...

Lake Naivasha in Kenya is an important natural fresh water reserve, supporting surrounding wildlife as well as agriculture and industry. Uncontrolled use of the lake water for the past few decades is causing concern for environmentalists. In the present paper, fluctuations in the lake level for...

Porous materials such as sedimentary rocks often show a fractal character at certain length scales. Deterministic fractal generators, iterated upto several stages and then repeated periodically, provide a realistic model for such systems. On the fractal, diffusion is anomalous, and obeys the law...

Gamma irradiation influences the microstructure of polymers that significantly affects the correlated properties of solid polymer electrolytes (SPEs). The present paper introduces a deterministic fractal model of polymer molecules and investigates the morphological changes due to gamma...

Experiments have been conducted to study crack patterns forming in drying films of laponite. The patterns have been analysed to observe the self-similarity of the structure, with respect to crack width. Ped-size distributions and other features are also studied. We coarse-grain the pattern,...

When two or more different materials are combined to form composites, the property of the composite may be quite different. This depends on relative interaction strengths of cohesion between similar and adhesion between dissimilar particles. We study crack formation in composites through a very...

We present simulation results for random walks on a family of Sierpinski Carpets, under a periodically varying bias. The diffusivity obtained from these results shows a power-law variation of the bias, with frequency. The exponent depends on details of the carpet generator. We discuss...