Cracking of dried colloidal films

 

Who hasn't seen old paint layers getting cracked? Even heritage artworks suffer this fate and can be exploited to gauge their age as well as devise methodologies for their restoration. This is our primary research question: How do such cracks form? Can we replicate them on a laboratory scale? Strategies to modulate these crack patterns? As a first step, you can see that modification of substrate wetting conditions affects crack morphology and dynamics.