The delivery of suspended active ingredients to a surface is a central function of numerous commercial cosmetic, drug, and agricultural formulations. Many products use liquid droplets as a delivery vehicle but, because interfacial tension keeps droplets spherical, these materials cannot exploit the benefits of anisotropic shape and shape change offered by solid colloids. In this work, individua...

Micronized droplets of olive oil loaded with docetaxel (1.0 mg.ml(-1)) and coated with fibrinogen were prepared and then characterized for physicochemical and cytotoxic properties in vitro and anticancer activity in vivo. The droplets remain readily dispersible and relatively stable in size for at least 24 h when stored at 4 degrees C. During storage, the fibrinogen remains bound to the droplet...

Microdroplets in microfluidic systems can be used as independent microreactors to perform a range of chemical and biological reactions. However, in order to add new reagents to pre-formed droplets at defined times, to start, modify, or terminate a reaction, it is necessary to perform a controlled fusion with a second droplet. We describe and characterize a simple and extremely reliable techniqu...

Respiratory infections can be spread via 'contact' with droplets from expiratory activities such as talking, coughing and sneezing, and also from aerosol-generating clinical procedures. Droplet sizes predominately determine the times they can remain airborne, the possibility of spread of infectious diseases and thus the strategies for controlling the infections. While significant inconsistencie...

The optical identification of bioaerosols in the atmosphere and its discrimination against combustion related particles is a major issue for real-time, field compatible instruments. In the present paper, we show that by embedding advanced pump-probe depletion spectroscopy schemes in a portable instrument, it is possible to discriminate amino acid containing airborne particles (bacteria, humic p...

Abstract The origin of rebound suppression an impacting droplet by a small amount polymer additive has been tentatively explained various physical concepts including the dynamic surface tension, additional energy dissipation non-Newtonian elongational viscosity, elastic force stretched polymer, and friction on receding contact line. To better understand role molecular level, we performed multi-...

We report a study of the wetting and ordering of thermotropic liquid crystal (LC) droplets that are trapped (or "caged") within micrometer-sized cationic polymeric microcapsules dispersed in aqueous solutions of surfactants. When they were initially dispersed in water, we observed caged, nearly spherical droplets of E7, a nematic LC mixture, to occupy ∼40% of the interior volume of the polymeri...

We numerically study the behavior of self-propelled liquid droplets whose motion is triggered by a Marangoni-like flow. This latter is generated by variations of surfactant concentration which affect the droplet surface tension promoting its motion. In the present paper a model for droplets with a third amphiphilic component is adopted. The dynamics is described by Navier-Stokes and convection-...

The overall traffic of droplets in a network of microfluidic channels is strongly influenced by the liquid properties of the moving droplets. In particular, the effective hydrodynamic resistance of individual droplets plays a key role in their global behavior. Here we propose two simple and low-cost experimental methods for measuring this parameter by analyzing the dynamics of a regular sequenc...

A new method for assessing the site-specific emission from electronically excited helium droplets is presented. The fluorescence features of helium droplets show sharp rotationally resolved lines indicating desorption of excimers and emission far outside the droplets as well as blue-shifted and strongly broadened features due to emission of excimers confined in cavities within the droplets. A t...