Most of our daily commodities, such as plastics, alloys and processed foods, are provided as solids, and they are often processed by a controlled cooling process from a liquid mixture to a solid. Liquid crystals, solutions, polymers, and biomaterials form a wide variety of structural patterns arising from differences in the cooling processes. These patterns provide a diversity of functions, and can significantly influence the properties of solid products. For this reason, understanding how the cooling process proceeds and how it can be controlled is important in diverse research fields such as physics, biology, materials science, and engineering.
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Source: Phys.org