title: Topology of desiccation crack patterns in clay and invariance of crack interface area with thickness.
abstract: We study the crack patterns developed on desiccating films of suspensions of three different clays-bentonite, halloysite nanoclay and laponite on a glass substrate. Varying the thickness of the layer, h gives the following new and interesting results: i) We can identify a critical thickness h c for bentonite and halloysite, above which isolated cracks join each other to form a fully connected network. ii) A topological analysis involving the Euler number is shown to be useful for characterising the patterns. iii) We find, further, that the total vertical surface area of the clay A v, which has opened up due to cracking, and the total area of the glass substrate A s, exposed by the hierarchical sequence of cracks are constant, independent of the layer thickness for a certain range of h. These results are shown to be consistent with a simple energy conservation argument, neglecting dissipative losses. Finally we show that if the crack pattern is viewed at successively finer resolution, the total cumulative area of cracks visible at a certain resolution scales with the layer thickness.
authors.affiliation: Condensed Matter Physics Research Centre, Physics Department, Jadavpur University, 700032, Kolkata, India, tajkerakhatun88@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Tajkera
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Khatun
authors.forename: Tapati
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Dutta
authors.forename: Sujata
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tarafdar
mesh_terms: D000538:Aluminum Silicates / Q000737:chemistry*; D000077215:Clay; D003890:Desiccation
chemical_list: D000538:Aluminum Silicates; D000077215:Clay