We study the interaction of an elastic beam with a liquid drop in the case where bending and extensional effects are both present. We use a variational approach to derive equilibrium equations and constitutive relation for the beam. This relation is shown to include a term due to surface energy in addition to the classical Young's modulus term, leading to a modification of Hooke's law. At the t...

A silicon-based microscale distillation chip was fabricated consisting of a micro-channel 600 μm in width and 40 cm in length. Micropillars were incorporated in the micro-channel to direct liquid flow from the cooled to the heated end by capillarity. A feed of a 19 mol% acetone-water mixture was separated to 95+ mol% acetone in the distillate and 11 mol% in the bottom stream. This distillation ...

Dynamic wetting and electrowetting are explored using molecular dynamics simulations. The propagation of the precursor film (PF) is fast and obeys the power law with respect to time. Against the former studies, we find the PF is no slip and solidlike. As an important application of the PF, the electro-elasto-capillarity, which is a good candidate for drug delivery at the micro- or nanoscale, is...

We study the thermocapillary-driven spreading of a droplet on a nonuniformly heated substrate for fluids associated with a non-monotonic dependence of the surface tension on temperature. We use lubrication theory to derive an evolution equation for the interface that accounts for capillarity and thermocapillarity. The contact line singularity is relieved by using a slip model and a Cox-Voinov r...

Expressions to obtain composition shifts due to capillarity are presented when the chemical potential shifts of the precipitate phase are taken into account. These are applied to calculate the precipitate coarsening kinetics in multicomponent systems, showing dependence on the solution thermodynamics followed by the continuous phase. 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. on behalf of Acta Mat...

Although negligible at macroscopic scales, capillary forces become dominant as the sub-millimetric scales of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) are considered. We review various situations, not limited to micro-technologies, where capillary forces are able to deform elastic structures. In particular, we define the different length scales that are relevant for 'elasto-capillary' problems. W...

The elastic deformation of a soft solid induced by capillary forces crucially relies on the excess stress inside the solid-liquid interface. While for a liquid-liquid interface this "surface stress" is strictly identical to the "surface free energy," the thermodynamic Shuttleworth equation implies that this is no longer the case when one of the phases is elastic. Here we develop a microscopic m...