Crack patterns in drying binary-mixture suspensions

Gaining control over the drying of particulate suspensions is important in a wide range of applications including coating and printing of electronic circuits. While most of these applications rely on multicomponent mixture of solvents to achieve their desired functionality, our current understanding of crack patterns and their evolution is limited to single-solvent suspensions. Here we report on our observations of drying suspensions of colloidal particles dispersed in binary liquids. We discuss how differential evaporation of the two liquids and the resulting surface tension gradients can influence the spatiotemporal evolution of the crack morphologies.