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An elastomer swelling actuator deforms by absorbing a fluid, thus generating mechanical movement. We show that depositing small droplets of low molecular weight liquid crystal on liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) films leads to shape changes…
Diffusioosmotic flow arises in microfluidic configurations due to solute concentration gradients. In soft microfluidic channels, internal pressure gradients generated by diffusioosmotic flow to conserve mass result in elastic deformation of…
This fluid dynamics video showcases how optically induced electrowetting can be used to manipulate liquid droplets in open space and particulate phases inside the droplet. A photoconductive layer is added to a conventional…
This paper considers the interaction between two droplets placed on a substrate in immediate vicinity. We show here that when the two droplets are of different fluids and especially when one of the droplet is highly volatile, a wealth of…
An evaporating droplet is a dynamic system in which flow is spontaneously generated to minimize the surface energy, dragging particles to the borders and ultimately resulting in the so-called "coffee-stain effect". The situation becomes…
Modification and control over the vaporization kinetics of microfluidic droplets may have strong utilitarian implications in several scientific and technological applications. The article reports the control over the vaporization kinetics…
Metamaterials provide exceptional control over physical phenomena, enabling many disruptive technologies. However, researches in hydrodynamic meta-devices have mainly used intrusive methods to manipulate material structures, limited by…
Self-encapsulated droplets floating at an oil--air interface undergo striking shape changes during evaporation, including flattening and localized loss of membrane tension leading to crumpling and wrinkling. Here we combine experiments,…
Most passive droplet transport strategies rely on spatial variations of material properties to drive droplet motion, leading to gradient-based mechanisms with intrinsic length scales that limit the droplet velocity or the transport…
Capillary forces guide the motion of biomolecular condensates, water-borne insects, and breakfast cereal. These surface-mediated interactions can be harnessed to build units into materials with exotic properties deriving from mesoscale…
The wetting of solid surfaces can be manoeuvred by altering the energy balance at the interfacial region. While electric field acts favourably to spread a droplet on a rigid surface, this tendency may be significantly suppressed over soft…
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…
We report on the elastocapillary deformation of flexible microfibers in contact with liquid droplets. A fiber is observed to bend more as the size of the contacting droplet is increased. At a critical droplet size, proportional to the…
The stable configurations formed by two viscoelastic, ellipsoid-shaped droplets during their arrested coalescence has been investigated using micromanipulation experiments. Ellipsoidal droplets are produced by millifluidic emulsification of…
A sessile liquid drop can deform the substrate on which it rests if the solid is sufficiently "soft". In this paper we compute the detailed spatial structure of the capillary forces exerted by the drop on the solid substrate using a model…
This is a fluid dynamics video illustrating the impact of ferrofluidic droplets on surfaces of variable wettability. Surfaces studied include mica, teflon, and superhydrophobic. A magnet is placed beneath each surface, which modifies the…
We study the interaction of small hydrophobic particles on the surface of an ultra-soft elastic gel, in which a small amount of elasticity of the medium balances the weights of the particles. The excess energy of the surface of the deformed…
The spontaneous migration of droplets on conical fibers is studied experimentally by depositing silicone oil droplets onto conical glass fibers. Their motion is recorded using optical microscopy and analysed to extract the relevant…
We investigate the deformation of elastic microcapsules adsorbed at liquid-liquid interfaces. An initially spherical elastic capsule at a liquid-liquid interface undergoes circumferential stretching due to the liquid-liquid surface tension…
We report an unexpected behavior in wetting dynamics on soft silicone substrates: the dynamics of aqueous droplets deposited on vertical plates of such elastomers exhibits two successive speed regimes. This macroscopic observation is found…