Liquid Metals: Liquid Metal Marbles (Adv. Funct. Mater. 2/2013)

Remotely Controllable Liquid Marbles

With the ongoing need for miniaturized systems in many biological and chemical applications, there is an increasing demand for the development of versatile methods for controllable transport and manipulation of small volumes of liquids. [ 1–9 ] Recently, liquid marbles — liquid droplets encapsulated by self-organized hydrophobic particles at the liquid/air interface — have been revealed as a ne...

Coalescence of electrically charged liquid marbles.

In this work, we investigated the coalescence of liquid water marbles driven by a DC electric field. We have found that two contacting liquid marbles can be forced to coalesce when they are charged by a sufficiently high voltage. The threshold voltage leading to the electro-coalescence sensitively depends on the stabilizing particles as well as the surface tension of the aqueous phase. By evalu...

Materials and Wireless Microfluidic Systems for Electronics Capable of Chemical Dissolution on Demand (Adv. Funct. Mater. 92015)

Liquid marbles prepared from pH-responsive self-assembled micelles.

In this study, we report the assembly of amphiphilic polymeric micelles at the liquid/air interface to prepare liquid marbles for the first time. The polymeric micelles were synthesized from the self-assembly of a fluoropolymer, poly(styrene-co-acrylic acid-co-2,2,3,4,4,4-hexafluorobutyl methacrylate), in a selective solvent. The particle size, morphology and chemical composition of the micelle...

Tayler instability in liquid metal columns and liquid metal batteries

In this paper we investigate the Tayler instability in an incompressible, viscous and resistive liquid metal column and in a model of a liquid metal battery (LMB). Detailed comparisons between theory and numerics, both in linear and nonlinear regimes, are performed. We identify the timescale that is well adapted to the quasi-static (QS) regime and find the range of Hartmann numbers where this a...