Malleable Patterns from the Evaporation of a Colloidal Liquid Bridge: Coffee Ring to the Scallop Shell.

The present article highlights an approach to generating contrasting patterns from drying colloidal droplets in a liquid bridge configuration, different from well-known coffee rings. Reduction of the confinement distance (the gap between the solid surfaces) leads to systematized nanoparticle agglomeration yielding spoke-like patterns similar to those found on scallop shells instead of circumferential edge deposition. Alteration of the confinement distance modulates the curvature that entails variations in the evaporation flux across the liquid-vapor interface. Consequently, flow inside different liquid bridges (LBs) varies significantly for different confinement distance. Small confinement distance results in the stick-slip motion of squeezed liquid bridges. On the contrary, the stretched LBs exhibit pinned contact lines. The confinement distance determines the characteristic length scales of the thin film formed near the contact line, and its theoretical estimations are validated against the experimental observations using reflection interferometry, further exhibiting good agreement (in order of magnitude). We decipher a proposition that a drying liquid thin film (height ∼ O(10)m) present during dewetting near the three-phase contact line is responsible for the aligned deposition of particles. The coupled interplay of contact line dynamics, evaporation induced advection, and dewetting of the thin film at a three-phase interface contributes to the differences in deposition patterns.