Related papers: Interfacial activity dynamics of confined active d…
Geometric confinements are frequently encountered in the biological world and strongly affect the stability, topology, and transport properties of active suspensions in viscous flow. Based on a far-field analytical model, the…
A micron-sized droplet of bromine water immersed in a surfactant-laden oil phase can swim (S. Thutupalli, R. Seemann, S. Herminghaus, New J. Phys. 13 073021 (2011)). The bromine reacts with the surfactant at the droplet interface and…
Microorganisms navigating through narrow spaces encounter significant hydrodynamic challenges. To overcome these constraints and sustain efficient motion, they employ adaptive strategies, including adaptive oscillatory body deformations.…
Individual chemically active drops suspended in a surfactant solution were observed to self-propel spontaneously with straight, helical, or chaotic trajectories. To elucidate how these drops can exhibit such strikingly different dynamics…
Active drops emit/absorb chemical solutes, whose concentration gradients cause interfacial flows driving their own transport and the propulsion of the droplet. Such non-linear coupling enables active drops to achieve directed…
Experimental observations indicate that chemically active droplets suspended in a surfactant-laden fluid can self-propel spontaneously. The onset of this motion is attributed to a symmetry-breaking Marangoni instability resulting from the…
The acoustofluidic method holds great promise for manipulating microorganisms. When exposed to the steady vortex structures of acoustic streaming flow, these microorganisms exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as hydrodynamic trapping…
Recently, there is much interest in droplet condensation on soft or liquid/liquid-like substrates. Droplets can deform soft and liquid interfaces resulting in a wealth of phenomena not observed on hard, solid surfaces (e.g., increased…
Droplet microfluidics, in which micro-droplets serve as individual reactors, has enabled a wide range of high-throughput biochemical processes. Unlike solid wells typically used in current biochemical assays, droplets are subject to…
The propulsion of active particles by self-diffusiophoresis is driven by asymmetric catalytic reactions on the particle surface that generate a mechanochemical coupling between the fluid velocity and the concentration fields of fuel and…
We study emergent dynamics in a viscous drop subject to interfacial nematic activity. Using hydrodynamic simulations, we show how the interplay of nematodynamics, activity-driven flows and surface deformations gives rise to a sequence of…
Control of fluid dynamics at the micrometer scale is essential to emulsion science and materials design, which is ubiquitous in everyday life and is frequently encountered in industrial applications. Most studies on multiphase flow focus on…
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…
We study the hydrodynamics and shape changes of chemically active droplets. In non-spherical droplets, surface tension generates hydrodynamic flows that drive liquid droplets into a spherical shape. Here we show that spherical droplets that…
Flows enabled by phoretic mechanisms are of significant interest in several biological and biomedical processes, such as bacterial motion and targeted drug delivery. Here, we develop a homogenization-based macroscopic boundary condition…
Understanding the dynamics of drops on polymer-coated surfaces is crucial for optimizing applications such as self-cleaning materials or microfluidic devices. While the static and dynamic properties of deposited drops have been well…
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…
Controlling interfaces of phase separating fluid mixtures is key to creating diverse functional soft materials. Traditionally, this is accomplished with surface-modifying chemical agents. Using experiment and theory, we study how mechanical…
Interfacial instabilities in multicomponent fluidic systems are widespread in nature and in industrial processes, yet controlling their dynamics remains a challenge. Here, we present a strategy to actively tune Marangoni-driven…
We numerically study the dynamics of a passive fluid droplet confined within a microchannel whose walls are covered with a thin layer of active gel. The latter represents a fluid of extensile material modelling, for example, a suspension of…