Electrostatic tweezer for droplet manipulation

Various physical tweezers for manipulating liquid droplets based on optical, electrical, magnetic, acoustic, or other external fields have emerged and revolutionized research and application in medical, biological, and environmental fields. Despite notable progress, the existing modalities for droplet control and manipulation are still limited by the extra responsive additives and relatively poor controllability in terms of droplet motion behaviors, such as distance, velocity, and direction. Herein, we report a versatile droplet electrostatic tweezer (DEST) for remotely and programmatically trapping or guiding the liquid droplets under diverse conditions, such as in open and closed spaces and on flat and tilted surfaces as well as in oil medium. DEST, leveraging on the coulomb attraction force resulting from its electrostatic induction to a droplet, could manipulate droplets of various compositions, volumes, and arrays on various substrates, offering a potential platform for a series of applications, such as high-throughput surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy detection with single measuring time less than 20 s.

Multiple droplets on a conical fiber: formation, motion, and droplet mergers

Small droplets on slender conical fibers spontaneously move along the fiber due to capillary action. The droplet motion depends on the geometry of the cone, the surface wettability, the surface...

Stochastic models for the droplet motion and evaporation in under-resolved turbulent flows at a large Reynolds number

In this work we introduce a Lagrangian stochastic model for particle motion and evaporation to be used in large-eddy simulations (LES) of turbulent liquid sprays. Effects of small-scale intermittency, usually under-resolved in LES, are explicitly included via modelling of the energy dissipation rate seen by a droplet along its trajectory. Namely, the dissipation rate is linked to the norm of the droplet sub-filtered acceleration which is included in the droplet motion equation. This norm, along with the direction of the droplet sub-filtered acceleration, is simulated as a stochastic process. With increasing Reynolds number, the distribution of the sub-filtered acceleration develops longer tails, with a slower decay in auto-correlation functions of the norm and direction of this acceleration. The stochastic models are specified for particles larger and smaller the Kolmogorov length scale. The assumption of the droplet evaporation model is similar, i.e. the evaporation rate is strongly enhanced when a droplet is subjected to very localized zones of intense velocity gradients. Thereby, the overall evaporation process is assumed to be a succession of two steady-state sub-processes with equal intensities, i.e. evaporation and vapour mixing. Then the stochastic properties of the overall evaporation rate are also controlled by fluctuations of the energy dissipation rate along the droplet path, and with increasing Reynolds number, the intensity of fluctuations of this rate is also increasing. The assessment of the presented stochastic models in LES of high-speed non-evaporating and evaporating sprays show the accurate prediction of experimental data on relatively coarser grids along with a remarkably weaker sensitivity to the grid spacing. The joint statistics and Voronoi tessellations exhibit strong intermittency of evaporation rate. The intensity of turbulence along the droplet pathway substantially promotes the vaporization rate.

Modelling the water droplet motion on a leaf surface

The main object of the research given in this paper is modelling the water droplet movements on the leaf surface which is an important factor in realising how pesticide, nutrient or water engrossed through the surface. Therefore, a physical model based on mathematics proposed here for producing a realistic trajectory of droplet traversing a leaf surface. A vital feature of our methodology is to build the leaf surface using a recently developed method, by the author, so-called a hybrid CloughTocher cubic polynomial interpolation (CT-CPI) method. The leaf surface consisted of a mesh of triangles over which the hybrid CT-CPI method is build from 3D real life data gathered using a laser scanner. The droplet motion in our model affected by friction, resistance and gravity forces. The model verified using Matlab programming; the outcomes are promising and seem to capture reality well.