Related papers: Patterning droplets with durotaxis
Active fluid droplets are a class of soft materials exhibiting autonomous motion sustained by an energy supply. Such systems have been shown to capture motility regimes typical of biological cells and are ideal candidates as building-block…
The behavior of a microdrop of dielectric liquid suspended in a magnetic fluid and exposed to the action of electric and magnetic fields is studied experimentally. With increasing electric field, the deformation of droplets into oblate…
We discuss the usage of ratchet mechanisms to transport a continuous phase in several micro-fluidic settings. In particular, we study the transport of a dielectric liquid in a heterogeneous ratchet capacitor that is periodically switched on…
Droplets are the core functional units in microfluidic technologies that aim to integrate computation and reaction on a single platform. Achieving directed transport and control of these droplets typically demands elaborate substrate…
Plants have developed intricate mechanisms to adapt to changing light conditions. Besides photo- and helio- tropism -- the differential growth towards light and the diurnal motion with respect to sunlight -- chloroplast motion acts as a…
The dynamics of the interaction of a system of two thin volatile liquid droplets resting on a soft viscoelastic solid substrate are investigated theoretically. The developed model fully considers the effect of evaporative cooling and the…
A filament of liquid is usually unstable and breaks up into small droplets, while a filament of polymer solution is known to be quite stable against such instability, and they form a stable configuration of filament connecting two spherical…
We report an experimental study on the manipulation of colloidal particles in a drop sitting on a hydrogel. The manipulation is achieved by diffusiophoresis, which describes a directed motion of particles induced by solute gradients. By…
Droplet deformations caused by substrate vibrations are ubiquitous in nature and highly relevant for applications such as microreactors and single-cell sorting. The vibrations can induce droplet oscillations, a fundamental process that…
The controllability of passive microparticles that are advected with the fluid flow generated by an actively controlled one is studied. The particles are assumed to be suspended in a viscous fluid and well separated so that the far-field…
Stick-slip motion, a common phenomenon observed during crawling of cells, is found to be strongly sensitive to the substrate stiffness. Stick-slip behaviours have previously been investigated typically using purely elastic substrates. For a…
Molecular dynamics simulations of dense and rarefied fluids comprising small chain molecules in chemically patterned nano-channels predict a novel switching from Poiseuille to plug flow along the channel. We also demonstrate behavior akin…
We investigate the dynamics of nanoscale droplets in the vicinity of chemical steps which separate parts of a substrate with different wettabilities. Due to long-ranged dispersion forces, nanodroplets positioned on one side of the step…
We develop a lattice gas model for the drying of droplets of a nanoparticle suspension on a planar surface, using dynamical density functional theory (DDFT) to describe the time evolution of the solvent and nanoparticle density profiles.…
The locomotion of flexible membrane-like organisms on top of curved surfaces appears in different contexts and scales. Still, such dynamics have not yet been quantitatively modeled and no realization of such motion in manmade systems has…
Concentration gradients play a critical role in embryogenesis, bacterial locomotion, as well as the motility of active particles. Particles develop concentration profiles around them by dissolution, adsorption, or the reactivity of surface…
Electrowetting is a commonly used tool to manipulate sessile drops on hydrophobic surfaces. By applying an external voltage over a liquid and a dielectric-coated surface, one achieves a reduction of the macroscopic contact angles for…
Wetting and dewetting dynamics of simple and complex liquids is described by kinetic equations in gradient dynamics form that incorporates the various coupled dissipative processes in a fully thermodynamically consistent manner. After…
Trapping and manipulation of small particles underlies many scientific and technological applications. Recently, the precise manipulation of multiple small particles was demonstrated using a Stokes trap that relies only on fluid flow…
The design of strategies to generate efficient mixing is crucial for a variety of applications, particularly digital microfluidic devices that use small "discrete" fluid volumes (droplets) as fluid carriers and microreactors. In recent…