Peng Shuhua, Pinchasik Bat-El, Hao Hao, Möhwald Helmuth, Zhang Xuehua
Soft Matter & Interfaces Group, School of Engineering, RMIT University , Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia.
Department of Physics at Interfaces, Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research , Ackermannweg 10, 55128, Mainz, Germany.
J Phys Chem Lett. 2017 Feb 2;8(3):584-590. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.6b02861. Epub 2017 Jan 17.
Constructing controllable liquid patterns with high resolution and accuracy is of great importance in droplet depositions for a range of applications. Simple surface chemical micropatterns have been popularly used to regulate the shape of liquid droplets and the final structure of deposited materials. In this work, we study the morphological evolution of a dissolving femtoliter droplet pinned on multiple microdomains. On the basis of minimization of interfacial energy, the numerical simulations predict various symmetric droplet profiles in equilibrium at different liquid volumes. However, our experimental results show both symmetric and asymmetric shapes of droplets due to contact line pinning and symmetry breaking during droplet dissolution. Upon slow volume reduction, the deposited microdroplet arrays on one single type of simple surface prepatterns spontaneously morphed into a series of complex regular 3D shapes. The findings in this work offer insights into design and prepararion of the rich and complex morphology of liquid patterns via simple surface premicropatterns.
构建具有高分辨率和高精度的可控液体图案在一系列应用的液滴沉积中具有重要意义。简单的表面化学微图案已被广泛用于调节液滴的形状和沉积材料的最终结构。在这项工作中，我们研究了固定在多个微域上的飞升级溶解液滴的形态演变。基于界面能的最小化，数值模拟预测了在不同液体体积下处于平衡状态的各种对称液滴轮廓。然而，我们的实验结果表明，由于液滴溶解过程中的接触线钉扎和对称性破缺，液滴呈现出对称和不对称的形状。在缓慢体积减小的情况下，在一种简单表面预图案上沉积的微滴阵列会自发地演变成一系列复杂的规则三维形状。这项工作中的发现为通过简单的表面预微图案设计和制备丰富复杂的液体图案形态提供了见解。
