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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik
CPP 44: Wetting, Fluidics and Liquids at Interfaces and Surfaces II (joint session CPP/DY)
CPP 44.13: Talk
Thursday, March 30, 2023, 12:45–13:00, MER 02
Steering droplets on substrates with plane-wave wettability patterns and deformations — •Josua Grawitter and Holger Stark — Technische Universität Berlin, Institut für Theoretische Physik, Straße des 17. Juni 135, 10623 Berlin
Droplets are set in motion on substrates with a spatio-temporal wettability pattern as generated, for example, on light-switchable surfaces. To study such cases, we implement the boundary-element method to solve the governing Stokes equations for the fluid flow field inside and on the surface of a droplet and supplement it by Cox–Voinov friction for the dynamics of the contact line. One objective of our research is targeted microfluidic transport of such droplets. In earlier work we investigated how a droplet can be steered by imposing a wettability pattern on the substrate [Grawitter and Stark, Soft Matter 17, 2454 (2021)]. As a next step, we have recently extended our method to include substrates the height profile of which varies temporally in a prescribed manner.
We compare two cases: First, we investigate a droplet on substrates with planar-wave wettability pattern by varying the speed and wave length of the pattern. Second, we investigate a droplet on substrates with a planar-wave height profile. In both scenarios, for small wave velocities the droplet moves steadily forward. In contrast, above a wave velocity the droplet performs steady oscillations. These speed oscillations correlate with oscillations in the shape of the droplet which decay linearly as a function of pattern speed.