Related papers: Patterning droplets with durotaxis
The wetting of soft elastic substrates exhibits many features that have no counterpart on rigid surfaces. Modelling the detailed elastocapillary interactions is challenging, and has so far been limited to single contact lines or single…
Controlling the spatial distribution of liquid droplets on surfaces via surface energy patterning can be used to control material delivery to specified regions via selective liquid/solid wetting. While studies of the equilibrium shape of…
Droplet motion on surfaces influences phenomena as diverse as microfluidic liquid handling, printing technology and micro-organism migration. Typically, droplet motion is achieved by inducing energy gradients on a substrate or flow on the…
Droplets move on substrates with a spatio-temporal wettability pattern as generated, for example, on light-switchable surfaces. To study such cases, we implement the boundary-element method to solve the governing Stokes equations for the…
We demonstrate spontaneous bidirectional motion of droplets on liquid infused surfaces in the presence of a topographical gradient, in which the droplets can move either toward the denser or the sparser solid fraction area. Our analytical…
Fast and programmable transport of liquid droplets on a solid substrate is desirable in microfluidic, thermal, biomedical, and energy devices. Past research has focused on designing substrates with asymmetric structures or gradient…
Organisms often swim through fluids that are spatially inhomogeneous. If the fluids are polymeric, gradients in polymer concentration may lead to gradients in both fluid viscosity and elasticity. In this letter, we present theoretical…
We compare numerical and experimental results exploring the behaviour of liquid drops moving across a surface patterned with hydrophobic and hydrophilic stripes. A lattice Boltzmann algorithm is used to solve the hydrodynamic equations of…
A new type of water droplet transportation on microstructured hydrophobic surface is proposed and investigated experimentally and theoretically - water droplet could be driven by scale effect which is different from the traditional methods.…
Liquid droplets usually wet smooth and homogeneous substrates isotropically. Recent research works have revealed that droplets sit, slide and spread anisotropically on uniaxially stretched soft substrates, showing an enhanced wettability…
Inspired by the observation of intricate and beautifully dynamic patterns generated by food coloring on clean glass slides, we have investigated the behavior of propylene glycol and water droplets on high energy surfaces. In this fluid…
Many animal cells change their shape depending on the stiffness of the substrate on which they are cultured: they assume small, rounded shapes in soft ECMs, they elongate within stiffer ECMs, and flatten out on hard substrates. Cells tend…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is an important mechanism for compartmentalizing the cell's cytoplasm, allowing the dynamic organization of the components necessary for survival. However, it is not clear how phase separation is affected by…
Patterning solid surfaces with varying wettability is important to manage droplets in microfluidics, heat transfer and printing. Solid surface roughness poses fundamental limitations including contact-line pinning and solid friction. Here,…
How to make small liquid droplets move spontaneously and directionally on solid surfaces is a challenge in lab-on-chip technologies, DNA analysis, and heat exchangers. The best-known mechanism, a wettability gradient, does not move droplets…
Here, we study the coalescence of two droplets that are moving in the same direction on a soft surface; the motion of the droplets is caused by a gradient in the surface stiffness. As reference, stationary coalescence of the same droplets…
Anisotropically wetting substrates enable useful control of droplet behavior across a range of applications. Usually, these involve chemically or physically patterning the substrate surface, or applying gradients in properties like…
We examine theoretically the effects of random topographical substrates on the motion of two-dimensional droplets via appropriate statistical approaches. Different random substrate families are represented as stationary random functions.…
Recent experimental studies have demonstrated that cellular motion can be directed by topographical gradients, such as those resulting from spatial variations in the features of a micropatterned substrate. This phenomenon, known as…
In recent decades novel solid substrates have been designed which change their wettability in response to light or an electrostatic field. Here, we investigate a droplet on substrates with oscillating uniform wettability by varying minimium…