Related papers: Guided droplet transport on synthetic slippery sur…
The transport of small quantities of liquid on a solid surface is inhibited by the resistance to motion caused by the contact between the liquid and the solid. To overcome such resistance, motion can be externally driven through gradients…
Pendant drops spontaneously appear on the underside of wet surfaces through the Rayleigh-Taylor instability. These droplets have no contact line, they are connected to a thin liquid film with which they exchange liquid and are thus mobile:…
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…
Droplet mobility under shear flows is important in a wide range of engineering applications, e.g., fog collection, and self-cleaning surfaces. For structured surfaces to achieve superhydrophobicity, the removal of stains adhered within the…
Liquid-infused membranes inspired by slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces (SLIPS) have been recently introduced to membrane technology. The gating mechanism of these membranes is expected to give rise to anti-fouling properties and…
Droplets on rough surfaces can exhibit various stationary states that are crucial for designing hydrophobic materials and enabling directional liquid transport. Here we introduce a phase-field saddle dynamics method to construct the…
An essential element in the web-trap architecture, the capture silk spun by ecribellate orb spiders consists of glue droplets sitting astride a silk filament. Mechanically this thread presents a mixed solid-liquid behavior unknown to date.…
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…
Conventional slippery surfaces show isotropic drop mobility in all directions, but many applications require directional drop motion along a particular path only. In previous studies, researchers used topographic substrates, together with…
Liquid infused surfaces with partially wetting lubricants have recently been exploited for numerous intriguing applications, such as for droplet manipulation, droplet collection and spontaneous motion. When partially wetting lubricants are…
Applications such as digital microfluidics and bio-diagnostics rely on droplet locomotion. A prominent example of such motion is durotaxis, a phenomenon that requires a stiffness gradient along a surface for the transport of liquids, cells,…
Drops of active liquid crystal have recently shown the ability to self-propel, which was associated with topological defects in the orientation of active filaments [Sanchez {\em et al.}, Nature {\bf 491}, 431 (2013)]. Here, we study the…
We demonstrate a novel technique to fabricate mechanically tunable slippery surfaces using one dimensional (anisotropic) elastic wrinkles. Such wrinkles show tunable topography (amplitude) on the application of mechanical strain. Following…
We present a fluid dynamics video showing the adhesion of a drop to a superhydrophobic surface. We use environmental scanning electron microscopy to observe depinning events at the microscale. As the drop moves along the surface, the…
Using Molecular Dynamics simulations of a coarse-grained polymer liquid we investigate the transport of droplets on asymmetrically structured (saw-tooth shaped), vibrating substrates. Due to a continuous supply of power by substrate…
We present direct experimental evidence that water droplets can spontaneously penetrate non-wetting capillaries, driven by the action of Laplace pressure due to high droplet curvature. Using high-speed optical imaging, microcapillaries of…
Directed, long-range and self-propelled transport of droplets on solid surfaces, especially on water repellent surfaces, is crucial for many applications from water harvesting to bio-analytical devices. One appealing strategy to achieve the…
Self-propelled droplet jumping during condensation has attractive prospects for energy harvesting, water collection and thermal management, but its real-life applications are greatly limited to the challenge of enabling a sustainable…
Earlier works found out spontaneous directional motion of liquid droplets on hydrophilic conical surfaces, however, not hydrophobic case. Here we show that droplets on any surface may take place spontaneous directional motion without…
Textured hydrophobic surfaces that repel liquid droplets unidirectionally are found in nature such as butterfly wings and ryegrass leaves and are also essential in technological processes such as self-cleaning and anti-icing. However,…