Thermally driven Marangoni surfers

Thermally driven Marangoni surfers

Precision Marangoni-driven patterning.

A Marangoni flow is shown to occur when a polymer film possessing a spatially-defined surface energy pattern is heated above its glass transition to the liquid state. This can be harnessed to rapidly manufacture polymer films possessing prescribed height profiles. To quantify and verify this phenomenon, a model is described here which accurately predicts the formation, growth, and eventual diss...

Evaporatively-driven Marangoni instabilities of volatile liquid films spreading on thermally conductive substrates

Laser confocal microscopy is used to non-invasively investigate the steady and unsteady evolution of viscous microdroplets on solid substrates. Three characteristic dynamical regimes of spreading drops (viscous-capillary, viscous-inertia-capillary, and inertia-capillary) are studied using this non-invasive optical technique. It is shown that the dynamics of each regime depend on the Ohnesorge n...

Structure of Marangoni-driven singularities

This work presents an analytical study of the structure of steady Marangoni-driven singularities in the context of chemical-reaction driven tip-streaming, which identifies the conditions when such singularities are observable. As motivated by experimental observations of the conical symmetry of the problem, one can construct self-similar solutions of the Stokes equations, which are singular at ...

Marangoni-driven singularities via mean-curvature flow

In this work, it is demonstrated that the existence and topology of the recently observed interfacial singularities driven by Marangoni effects can be deduced using mean-curvature flow theory extended to account for variations of interfacial tension. This suggests that some of the physical mechanisms underlying the formation of these interfacial singularities may originate from/be modeled by th...