I have seen this Experiment: ELECTRORHEOLOGICAL FLUIDS and balloon Experiment (Stops flow with Static Electricity), and have seen that simple cornstarch is affected by electrostatic forces.
The mixture of cornstarch and oil is a non-Newtonian viscoelastic fluid, i.e. it exhibits viscosity dependent on the strain rate history and can exhibit solid-like behavior when a load that varies fast with time is applied. Even more interesting is if we apply electric forces on this fluid. Due to the force it experiences, it can solidify for the time the force varies significantly with time.
But can we create an arbitrary shape of the solidified fluid by an appropriate spatial structure of the electric field that we apply? For a short time interval?
That we can transform the liquid-like mixture to some definite shape (like a cylinder, like a cube, etc.) for a brief period of time when applying electric fields (and after that it goes back into liquid-like behavior)?
