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American Chemical Society, Langmuir, 3(31), p. 1011-1016, 2015

DOI: 10.1021/la503931p

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Dielectrophoresis-Driven Spreading of Immersed Liquid Droplets

Journal article published in 2014 by Carl V. Brown ORCID, Glen McHale, Christophe Lionel Trabi ORCID
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

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Abstract

In recent years electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) has become an effective tool to control partial wetting. EWOD uses the liquid-solid interface as part of a capacitive structure that allows capacitive and interfacial energies to adjust by changes in wetting when the liquid-solid interface is charged due to an applied voltage. An important aspect of EWOD has been its applications in microfluidics in chemistry and biology, and in optical devices and displays in physics and engineering. Many of these rely on the use of a liquid droplet immersed in a second liquid due to either the need for neutral buoyancy to overcome gravity and shield against impact shocks, or to encapsulate the droplet for other reasons, such as in microfluidic based DNA analyses. Recently, it has been shown that non-wetting oleophobic surfaces can be forcibly wetted by non-conducting oils using non-uniform electric fields and an interface-localized form of liquid dielectrophoresis (dielectrowetting). Here we show that this effect can be used to create films of oil immersed in a second immiscible fluid of lower permittivity. We predict that the square of the thickness of the film should obey a simple law dependent on the square of the applied voltage and with strength dependent on the ratio of difference in permittivity to the liquid-fluid interfacial tension, Δε/γLF. This relationship is experimentally confirmed for eleven liquid-air and liquid-liquid combinations with Δε/γLF having a span of more than two orders of magnitude. We therefore provide fundamental understanding of dielectrowetting for liquid-in-liquid systems, but also open up a new method to determine liquid-liquid interfacial tensions.