Related papers: Droplets sit and slide anisotropically on soft, st…

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…

The wetting of soft polymer substrates brings in multiple complexities as compared to the wetting on rigid substrates. The contact angle of the liquid is no longer governed by Young's law, but is affected by the substrate's bulk and surface…

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…

The surface tension of partially wetting droplets deforms soft substrates. These deformations are usually localized to a narrow region near the contact line, forming a so-called `elastocapillary ridge.' When a droplet slides along a…

Viscous droplets impinging on soft substrates may exhibit several distinct behaviours including repeated bouncing, wetting, and hovering, i.e., spreading and retracting after impact without bouncing back or wetting. We experimentally study…

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…

A liquid drop impacting a dry solid surface with sufficient kinetic energy will splash, breaking apart into numerous secondary droplets. This phenomenon shows many similarities to forced wetting, including the entrainment of air at the…

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…

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…

Droplets splash when they impact dry, flat substrates above a critical velocity that depends on parameters such as droplet size, viscosity and air pressure. By imaging ethanol drops impacting silicone gels of different stiffnesses we show…

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.…

Soft materials are ubiquitous in technological applications that require deformability, for instance, in flexible, water-repellent coatings. However, the wetting properties of pre-strained soft materials are only beginning to be explored.…

Deformed droplets are ubiquitous in various industrial applications, such as inkjet printing, lab-on-a-chip devices, and spray cooling, and can fundamentally affect the involved applications both favorably and unfavorably. Here, we employ…

We study experimentally the dynamics of a water droplet on a tilted and vertically oscillating rigid fibre. As we vary the frequency and amplitude of the oscillations the droplet transitions between different modes: harmonic pumping,…

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 present a molecular dynamics study of the motion of cylindrical polymer droplets on striped surfaces. We first consider the equilibrium properties of droplets on different surfaces, we show that for small stripes the Cassie-Baxter…

We study the rolling and sliding motion of droplets on a corrugated substrate by Molecular Dynamics simulations. Droplets are driven by an external body force (gravity) and we investigate the velocity profile and dissipation mechanisms in…

Soft substrates are deformed by liquid-vapor surface tension upon contact with liquid droplets, forming the well-known wetting ridge. This ridge dynamically propagates with the moving contact line and critically influences liquid spreading.…

The nature of adhesion of droplets to surfaces is a long pending scientific question. With the evolution of complex surfaces, quantification and prediction of these forces become intricate. Nevertheless, understanding these forces is highly…

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…