Monitoring the buckling threshold of drying colloidal droplets using water-ethanol mixtures.

We visualize the drying of droplets of colloids suspended in a mixture of two miscible solvents, namely water and ethanol. After a period of isotropic shrinkage, droplets suddenly buckle like elastic shells. For a fixed colloid solid fraction, the buckling threshold evolves as a function of ethanol content, due to changes of the solvent mixture physical properties, such as viscosity and evaporation rate. A simplified model predicting the qualitative behavior of the buckling threshold as a function of the initial ethanol mass fraction has been developed that fits well experimental results.