Tag: droplets

Dancing Droplets
What makes drops of food coloring able to dance, chase, sort themselves, or align with one another? This unexpected behavior is a consequence of food coloring consisting of two mixed liquids: water and propylene glycol. Both have their own surface tension properties and evaporation rates, which ultimately drives the behavior you see in the animations above. Both long-range and short-range interactions are observed. The former are due to vapor from each droplet adsorbing onto the glass around the droplet, thereby changing the local surface tension and causing nearby drops to feel an attractive force. The short-range effects are also surface-tension-driven. Droplets with lower surface tension will naturally try to flow toward areas of higher surface tension, which causes them to “chase” dissimilar adjacent drops. You can learn more about the research in the videos linked below (especially the last two), or you can read about the work in this article or the original research paper. (Image credit: N. Cira et al., source videos 1, 2, 3, 4; GIFs via freshphotons; submitted by entropy-perturbation)
March 30, 2015
Laser-Made Superhydrophobics
Superhydrophobic surfaces are so repellent to water that liquids often cannot wet them. Today these surfaces are usually created with chemical coatings or deliberate manufacturing to create micro- and nanoscale structures that trap air between the drop and the surface in order to prevent adhesion. Researchers recently announced they’ve made metals superhydrophobic with laser treatments. The process is still time-consuming, but they hope it can be scaled up for wider applications. Because drops bounce so readily off the treated surfaces, it takes very little water to clean them, which may be especially useful for sanitation purposes in the developing world. Superhydrophobic materials are also good for preventing icing on aircraft wings. To learn more about the research, check out the University of Rochester’s video explanations. (Image credit: C. Guo et al., source videos 1,2; submitted by entropy-perturbation and buckitdrop)
January 23, 2015
Jumping Droplets
When droplets on a superhydrophobic surface coalesce with one another, they jump. Individually, each drop has a surface energy that depends on its size. When two smaller droplets coalesce into a larger drop, the final drop’s surface energy is smaller than the sum of the parent droplets. Energy has to be conserved, though, so that excess surface energy gets converted to kinetic energy, causing the new droplet to leap up. Smaller droplets have higher jumping velocities. For more, see the original video. (Image credit: J. Boreyko and C. Chen, source video)
December 16, 2014
Levitating Droplets with Motion
There are many ways to levitate a droplet – heating, vibration, and acoustic levitation all come to mind – but this video demonstrates a simpler method: a moving wall. Depositing a drop on a moving wall keeps it aloft with a thin, constantly replenished layer of air. The thickness of this lubricating air film is directly measurable from interference fringes created by light reflecting off the surface of the drop. Incredibly, the air layer is only a few microns thick, but the resulting pressure in the air film is high enough to levitate millimeter-sized droplets! (Video credit: M. Saito et al.; via @AlvaroGuM)
October 23, 2014
Shooting Droplets
This animation shows high-speed video of a polystyrene particle striking a falling water droplet. Under the right conditions, the particle rips through the droplet, stretching the water into a bell-shaped lamella extending from a thicker rim. When the particle detaches, surface tension rapidly collapses the lamella into a ring which destabilizes. Thin ligaments and droplets fly off the crown-like ring as momentum overcomes surface tension’s ability to hold the droplet together. Be sure to check out the full video on YouTube or later next month at the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting. (Yes, I will be there!) (Image credit: V. Sechenyh et al., source video)
October 10, 2014
Bead-Infused Droplet
A Leidenfrost droplet impregnated with hydrophilic beads hovers on a thin film of its own vapor. The Leidenfrost effect occurs when a liquid touches a solid surface much, much hotter than its boiling point. Instead of boiling entirely away, part of the liquid vaporizes and the remaining liquid survives for extended periods while the vapor layer insulates it from the hot surface. Hydrophilic beads inserted into Leidenfrost water droplets initially sink and are completely enveloped by the liquid. But, as the drop evaporates, the beads self-organize, forming a monolayer that coats the surface of the drop. The outer surface of the beads drys out, trapping the beads and causing the evaporation rate to slow because less liquid is exposed. (Photo credit: L. Maquet et al.; research paper – pdf)
August 20, 2014
The March of Drops
I love science with a sense of humor. This video features a series of clips showing the behavior of droplets on what appears to be a superhydrophobic surface. In particular, there are some excellent examples of drops bouncing on an incline and droplets rebounding after impact. For droplets with enough momentum, impact flattens them like a pancake, with the rim sometimes forming a halo of droplets. If the momentum is high enough, these droplets can escape as satellite drops, but other times the rebound of the drop off the superhydrophobic surface is forceful enough to overcome the instability and draw the entire drop back off the surface. (Video credit: C. Antonini et al.)
May 23, 2014
Pointed Drops
When water droplets sit on a cold substrate, they freeze into a shape with a pointed tip. At first glance, this behavior seems very odd since surface tension usually acts to prevent such sharp protrusions. The shape is, however, a result of water’s expansion as it freezes. The droplet freezes from the substrate upward, with a concave shape to the solidification front. The angle of the point does not depend on the substrate temperature or the wetting angle between the water and surface. Instead, it turns out that this concave front shape and water’s expansion are the key factors that determine the pointed cusp’s angle, and that the final geometry of the cusp is essentially universal. (Video credit: M. Nauenberg; additional research credit: A. Marin et al.)
May 5, 2014
Water and Aerogel
Aerogel is an extremely light porous material formed when the liquid inside a gel is replaced with gas. When combined with water, aerogel powders can have some wild superhydrophobic effects. Here water condensed on a liquid nitrogen cooler has dripped onto a floor scattered with aerogel powder from the nitrogen’s shipping container. The result is that the water gets partially coated in aerogel powder and takes on some neat properties. Its contact angle with the surface increases – in other words, it beads up – which is typical of superhydrophobicity. When disturbed, the water breaks easily into droplets which do not immediately recombine upon contact. With sufficient distortion, they can rejoin. You can see some other neat examples of aerogel-coated water behaviors in this second video as well. (Video credit: ophilcial; submitted by Jason I.)
March 31, 2014
Air Pressure Affects Splashes
When a drop falls on a dry surface, our intuition tells us it will splash, breaking up into many smaller droplets. Yet this is not always the case. The splashing of a droplet depends on many factors, including surface roughness, viscosity, drop size, and–strangely enough–air pressure. It turns out there is a threshold air pressure below which splashing is suppressed. Instead, a drop will spread and flatten without breaking up, as shown in the video above. For contrast, here is the same fluid splashing at atmospheric pressure. This splash suppression at low pressures is observed for both low and high viscosity fluids. Although the mechanism by which gases affect splashing is still under investigation, measurements show that no significant air layer exists under the spreading droplet except near the very edges. This suggests that the splash mechanism depends on how the spreading liquid encroaches on the surrounding gas. (Video credit: S. Nagel et al.; research credit: M. Driscoll et al.)
January 21, 2014