Wheat grains can be considered as a natural cemented granular material. They are milled under highforces to produce food products such as flour. The major part of the grain is the so-called starchy endosperm.It contains stiff starch granules, which show a multi-modal size distribution, and a softer protein matrix thatsurrounds the granules. Experimental milling studies and numerical simulations are going hand in hand tobetter understand the fragmentation behavior of this biological material and to improve milling performance.We present a numerical study of the effect of granule size distribution on the strength of such a cementedgranular material. Samples of bi-modal starch granule size distribution were created and submitted to uniaxialtension, using a peridynamics method. We show that, when compared to the effects of starch-protein interfaceadhesion and voids, the granule size distribution has a limited effect on the samples’ yield stress.

In a first part I will focus on the destabilization of dilute oil-in-water emulsion-based liquid sheets expanding in air. A sheet results from the collision of a single tear on a small solid target ; it disintegrates through the nucleation and growth of holes that perforate the sheet. We have developed an optical technique that allows the determination of the time and space-resolved thickness of the sheet to gain a, understanding of the physical mechanisms f the perforation events This bursting based-liquid sheet destabilization is at the origin of emulsion-based anti-drift formulations are developed for agricultural spray. In a second part, I will investigate freely expanding sheets formed by ultra soft spherical gel beads of elastic but also liquid droplets with various surface tensions, and simple viscoelastic fluids (Maxwell fluids), produced by impacting them on a silicon wafer covered with a thin layer of liquid nitrogen that suppresses viscous dissipation by an inverse Leidenfrost effect. The experiments reveal a universal behaviour of the impact dynamics with impact velocity, for both solids and liquids, and even viscoelastic fluids, that we have rationalized .

A single-drop experiment based on the collision of one drop of liquid on a small solid target is used to produce liquid sheets that are visualized with a fast camera. Upon impact, the drop flattens into a sheet that is bounded by a thicker rim and radially expanding in air. Emulsion-based liquid sheets are destabilized through the nucleation of holes that perforate the sheet during its expansion. The holes grow until they merge together and form a web of ligaments, which are then destabilized into drops. We propose the perforation mechanism as a sequence of two necessary steps. The emulsion oil droplets first enter the air/water interface, and then spread at the interface. We show that the formulation of the emulsion is a critical parameter to control the perforation as the addition of salt or amphiphilic copolymers can trigger or completely inhibit the perforation mechanism. We demonstrate that the entering of the droplets at the air/water interface is the limiting step of the mechanism. Thin-film forces such as electrostatic or steric repulsion forces stabilize the thin film formed between the interface and the approaching oil droplets, thus preventing the entering of droplets at the interface and in turn inhibiting the perforation process. We theoretically rationalize the successive steps in the approach and entering of an oil droplet at the film interface and the role of salt and amphiphilic polymer in the different steps.

Model gluten gels