Cunjing Lv, Chao Chen, Yin-Chuan Chuang, Fan-Gang Tseng, Yajun Yin, Francois Grey, Quanshui Zheng
Making liquid droplets move spontaneously on solid surfaces is a key challenge in lab-on-chip and heat exchanger technologies. The best-known mechanism, a wettability gradient, does not generally move droplets rapidly enough and cannot drive droplets smaller than a critical size. Here we report how a curvature gradient is particularly effective at accelerating small droplets, and works for both hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces. Experiments for water droplets on tapered surfaces with curvature radii in the sub-millimeter range show a maximum speed of 0.28 m/s, two orders of magnitude higher than obtained by wettability gradient. We show that the force exerted on a droplet scales as the surface curvature gradient. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we observe nanoscale droplets moving spontaneously at over 100 m/s on tapered surfaces.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.6141
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