Spontaneous Formation of Stable Capillary Bridges for Firming Compact Colloidal Microstructures in Phase Separating Liquids: A Computational Study

Computer modeling and simulations are performed to investigate capillary bridges spontaneously formed between closely packed colloidal particles in phase separating liquids. The simulations reveal a self-stabilization mechanism that operates through diffusive equilibrium of two-phase liquid morphologies. Such mechanism renders desired microstructural stability and uniformity to the capillary bridges that are spontaneously formed during liquid solution phase separation. This self-stabilization behavior is in contrast to conventional coarsening processes during phase separation. The volume fraction limit of the separated liquid phases as well as the adhesion strength and thermodynamic stability of the capillary bridges are discussed. Capillary bridge formations in various compact colloid assemblies are considered. The study sheds light on a promising route to in-situ (in-liquid) firming of fragile colloidal crystals and other compact colloidal microstructures via capillary bridges

Existence of multiple solutions for a p(x)- biharmonic equation

The aim of this paper is to obtain at least three solutions for a Neumann problem involving the p(x)-biharmonic operator. The main tool used for obtaining our result is a three critical points theorem established by Ricceri

Acceleration of Histogram-Based Contrast Enhancement via Selective Downsampling

In this paper, we propose a general framework to accelerate the universal histogram-based image contrast enhancement (CE) algorithms. Both spatial and gray-level selective down- sampling of digital images are adopted to decrease computational cost, while the visual quality of enhanced images is still preserved and without apparent degradation. Mapping function calibration is novelly proposed to reconstruct the pixel mapping on the gray levels missed by downsampling. As two case studies, accelerations of histogram equalization (HE) and the state-of-the-art global CE algorithm, i.e., spatial mutual information and PageRank (SMIRANK), are presented detailedly. Both quantitative and qualitative assessment results have verified the effectiveness of our proposed CE acceleration framework. In typical tests, computational efficiencies of HE and SMIRANK have been speeded up by about 3.9 and 13.5 times, respectively.Comment: accepted by IET Image Processin