Droplet dissolution driven by emerging thermal gradients and Marangoni flow

Droplet microfluidics driven by gradients of confinement.

The miniaturization of droplet manipulation methods has led to drops being proposed as microreactors in many applications of biology and chemistry. In parallel, microfluidic methods have been applied to generate monodisperse emulsions for applications in the pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and food industries. To date, microfluidic droplet production has been dominated by a few designs that use hyd...

Marangoni-driven singularities via mean-curvature flow

In this work, it is demonstrated that the existence and topology of the recently observed interfacial singularities driven by Marangoni effects can be deduced using mean-curvature flow theory extended to account for variations of interfacial tension. This suggests that some of the physical mechanisms underlying the formation of these interfacial singularities may originate from/be modeled by th...

Drift instability in the motion of a fluid droplet with a chemically reactive surface driven by Marangoni flow.

We theoretically derive the amplitude equations for a self-propelled droplet driven by Marangoni flow. As advective flow driven by surface tension gradient is enhanced, the stationary state becomes unstable and the droplet starts to move. The velocity of the droplet is determined from a cubic nonlinear term in the amplitude equations. The obtained critical point and the characteristic velocity ...

Thermally driven Marangoni surfers

Precision Marangoni-driven patterning.

A Marangoni flow is shown to occur when a polymer film possessing a spatially-defined surface energy pattern is heated above its glass transition to the liquid state. This can be harnessed to rapidly manufacture polymer films possessing prescribed height profiles. To quantify and verify this phenomenon, a model is described here which accurately predicts the formation, growth, and eventual diss...