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The finding of droplet-based electricity generator (DEG), based on the moving boundary of electrical double layer, has triggered great research enthusiasm, and a breakthrough in instantaneous electric power density was achieved recently.…
There is a rising prospective in harvesting energy from water droplets, as microscale energy is required for the distributed sensors in the interconnected human society. However, achieving a sustainable direct-current generating device from…
Based on spin-dependent transport theory and thermodynamics, we develop a generalized theory of the Joule heating in the presence of a spin current. Along with the conventional Joule heating consisting of an electric current and…
The sliding motion of aqueous droplets on hydrohobic surfaces leads to charge separation at the trailing edge, with implications from triple-line friction to hydrovoltaic energy generation. Charges deposited on the solid surface have been…
Two oppositely charged droplets of (say) water in e.g. oil or air will tend to drift together under the influence of their charges. As they make contact, one might expect them to coalesce and form one large droplet, and this indeed happens…
The open water surface is known to be charged. Yet, the magnitude of the charge and the physical mechanism of the charging remain unclear, causing heated debates across the scientific community. Here we directly measure the charge Q of…
Recent experiments have shown that liquid drops on highly deformable substrates exhibit mutual interactions. This is similar to the Cheerios effect, the capillary interaction of solid particles at a liquid interface, but now the roles of…
The impact of liquid drops onto solid surfaces leads to conversion of kinetic energy of directed drop motion into various forms of energy including surface energy, vibrational energy, heat, and under suitable conditions, electrical energy.…
Harnessing energy from ubiquitous water resources via molecular-scale mechanisms remains a critical frontier in sustainable energy research. Herein, we present a novel evaporation-driven power generator based on a dynamic diode architecture…
An electronic current driven through a conductor can induce a current in another conductor through the famous Coulomb drag effect. Similar phenomena have been reported at the interface between a moving fluid and a conductor, but their…
Oil-water emulsions resist aggregation due to the presence of negative charges at their surface that leads to mutual repulsion between droplets, but the molecular origin of oil charge is currently under debate. While much evidence has…
Droplets of electrolyte solutions in an insulating medium are ubiquitous in nature. The net charges of these droplets are normally nonzero, and they fluctuate. However, a theory on the probability distribution function for the net charge of…
Contact electrification, or contact charging, refers to the process of static charge accumulation after rubbing, or even simple touching, of two materials. Despite its relevance in static electricity, various natural phenomena, and numerous…
The Young-Dupr\'e equation is a cornerstone of the equilibrium theory of capillary and wetting phenomena. In the biological world, interfacial phenomena are ubiquitous, from the spreading of bacterial colonies to tissue growth and flocking…
A new molecular dynamics model in which the point charges on atomic sites are allowed to fluctuate in response to the environment is developed and applied to water. The idea for treating charges as variables is based on the concept of…
The venerable theory of electrokinetic phenomena rests on the hypothesis of a dilute solution of point-like ions near a weakly charged surface, whose potential relative to the bulk is of order the thermal voltage ($kT/e \approx 25$ mV at…
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…
The intricate interaction between the deformability of a substrate and the dynamic spreading of a liquid drop on the same, under the application of an electrical voltage, has remained far from being well understood. Here, we demonstrate…
Ions in ionic liquids and concentrated electrolytes reside in a crowded, strongly-interacting environment, leading to the formation of discrete layers of charges at interfaces. Here, we propose a continuum theory that captures the…
The dip-coating geometry, where a solid plate is withdrawn from or plunged into a liquid pool, offers a prototypical example of wetting flows involving contact-line motion. Such flows are commonly studied using the lubrication approximation…