An Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) can be used to plot force against separation when a sphere is pushed into a viscoelastic mucus layer on a soft plane substrate and then retracted. Unilever wish to have a mathematical model of the process that could be used to determine the viscoelastic properties of the mucus from the measurements. The Study Group developed such a model and showed that it could provide force-separation curves with the same qualitative features as those obtained by Unilever in their experiments.

Problem presented by
Guoping Lian, Unilever

Study Group contributors
David Allwright (Industrial Mathematics KTN)
Leah Band (University of Nottingham)
Maurice Blount (DAMTP)
Sunny Chui-Webster (DAMTP)
Linda Cummings (University of Nottingham)
Rosemary Dyson (OCIAM)
Ian Griffiths (OCIAM)
Oliver Jensen (University of Nottingham)
John King (University of Nottingham)
James Oliver (University of Nottingham)
David Parker (University of Edinburgh)
Sylvain Reboux (University of Nottingham)
Michele Taroni (OCIAM)
Dominic Vella (DAMTP)
Robert Whittaker (University of Nottingham)
Maxim Zyskin (Oxford)