Related papers: Patterning droplets with durotaxis
Epithelial cell clusters often move collectively on a substrate. Mechanical signals play a major role in organizing this behavior. There are a number of experimental observations in these systems which await a comprehensive explanation.…
Here, we trap and control the position of droplets to study their dynamics using hydrodynamic forces alone without an external field. The hydrodynamic trap is adapted from a previously implemented Stokes trap by incorporating a…
Switchable and adaptive substrates emerged as valuable tools for the control of wetting and actuation of droplet motion. Here we report a computational study of the dynamics of an unstable thin liquid film deposited on a switchable…
Rheotaxis is a well-known phenomenon among microbial organisms and artificial active colloids, wherein the swimmers respond to an imposed flow. We report the first experimental evidence of upstream rheotaxis by spherical active droplets. It…
Electrowetting on textured and lubricant infused surfaces is conventionally expected to promote enhanced droplet spreading by reducing apparent contact angles. Contrary to this intuition, we report rapid tangential droplet ejection at…
The development of substrates with a switchable wettability is on a fast pace. The limit of switching frequencies and contact angle differences between substrate states are steadily pushed further. We investigate the behavior of a droplet…
Making liquid droplets move spontaneously on solid surfaces is a key challenge in lab-on-chip and heat exchanger technologies. The best-known mechanism, a wettability gradient, does not generally move droplets rapidly enough and cannot…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…
Biological tissues have been observed to display emergent fluid-like properties, owing to physical interactions between cells. However, it remains unclear in general how these fluid-like properties affect tissue structure and function.…
Liquid drops slide more slowly over soft, deformable substrates than over rigid solids. This phenomenon can be attributed to the viscoelastic dissipation induced by the moving wetting ridge, which inhibits a rapid motion, and is called…
The complicated dynamics of the contact line of a moving droplet on a solid substrate often hamper the efficient modeling of microfluidic systems. In particular, the selection of the effective boundary conditions, specifying the contact…
Droplet-based microfluidics has emerged as a powerful technology for the miniaturization and automation of biochemical assays. The replacement of surfactants by nanoparticles as interfacial stabilizers has gained increasing interest.…
From microfluidics to fog-harvesting applications, tiny droplets are transported along various solid substrates including hairs, threads, grooves, and other light structures. Driven by gravity, a droplet sliding along a vertical fiber is a…
The behavior of weakly deformed drops on non wetting surfaces is usually described using linear models. We show that these simple pictures cannot account for measurements of the dynamics of droplets that oscillate or bounce on…
The dynamics of droplets on substrates has a strong impact on microfluidic systems ranging from commercially available lab-on-chip systems to state of the art developments in open microfluidics. Coalescence of micro and nano droplets on a…
Liquid drops on soft solids generate strong deformations below the contact line, resulting from a balance of capillary and elastic forces. The movement of these drops may cause strong, potentially singular dissipation in the soft solid.…
It is demonstrated that non-coalescent droplets of acetone can be formed on liquid substrates. The fluid flows around and in an acetone droplet hovering on water are recorded to shed light on the mechanisms which might lead to…
Micropatterned substrates are often used to standardize cell experiments and to quantitatively study the relation between cell shape and function. Moreover, they are increasingly used in combination with traction force microscopy on soft…
Many biological active agents respond to gradients of environmental cues by redirecting their motion. Besides the well-studied prominent examples such as photo- and chemotaxis, there has been considerable recent interest in topotaxis, i.e.\…
We describe a setup to perform systematic studies on the spreading of droplets of complex fluids under microgravity conditions. Tweaking the gravitational acceleration under which droplets are deposited provides access to different regimes…