Nanosized titanium dioxide (nano-TiO2) particles are used in diverse products and devices, including photocatalytic water splitting and solar cells whose successful commercialization is still facing scientific and technologi-

Electrowetting (EW) involves the actuation of liquid droplets using electric fields and has been demonstrated as a powerful tool for initiating and controlling droplet-based microfluidic operations such as droplet transport, generation, splitting, merging and mixing. The heat transfer resulting from EWinduced droplet actuation has, however, remained largely unexplored owing to several challenge...

The transport of droplets in a pressure-atomized kerosene spray flame was examined using a twocomponent phase Doppler system to measure the droplet size and velocity distributions at several locations within the spray. The effect of combustion on droplet transport was examined by comparing the results to a nonburning spray under similar flow conditions. Directions of motion of droplets are calc...

This paper presents experimental results and analyses on the controlled manipulation of a liquid droplet. The droplet was manipulated upon local reduction and oxidation (redox) of dodecylbenzenesulfonate doped polypyrrole (PPy(DBS)) in an immiscible organic fluid of bulk dichloromethane (DCM, CH(2)Cl(2)). The electrochemically tunable wetting property of PPy(DBS) permitted liquid droplet manipu...

Generating chemical libraries in droplet form is vital to the adoption of microdroplet systems in high-throughput screening (HTS). This paper presents microfractionation in droplets (μFD), a method for generating heterogeneous droplet libraries using standard separation processes. In μFD, compounds eluting from a separation column are permanently encapsulated into droplets by a droplet generato...

We show that very low velocity droplets can be used to carry out an experiment to test whether condensate mediated transmission processes can occur in a superfluid droplet of He. By appropriately choosing the droplet radius and temperature, we can eliminate the competing roton, phonon, and ripplon mediated elastic transmission events. Then a calculation shows that if a few percent or more of th...

We study dense and highly polydisperse emulsions at droplet volume fractions ϕ≥0.65. We apply oscillatory shear and observe droplet motion using confocal microscopy. The presence of droplets with sizes several times the mean size dramatically changes the motion of smaller droplets. Both affine and nonaffine droplet motions are observed, with the more nonaffine motion exhibited by the smaller dr...

We have developed a surface energy traps enabled magnetic droplet manipulation platform that provides a full range of droplet operations and enables complex liquid handling, thereby greatly extending the applicability of magnetic droplet platform to intricate biomolecular assays.

An in-depth review on a new ultrasonic micro-droplet generator which utilizes megahertz (MHz) Faraday waves excited by silicon-based multiple Fourier horn ultrasonic nozzles (MFHUNs) and its potential applications is presented. The new droplet generator has demonstrated capability for producing micro droplets of controllable size and size distribution and desirable throughput at very low electr...

Anisotropic ratchet conveyors (ARCs) are a recently developed microfluidic platform that transports liquid droplets through a passive, microfabricated surface pattern and applied orthogonal vibrations. In this work, three new functionalities are presented for controlling droplet transport on the ARC system. These devices can pause droplet transport (ARC gate), decide between two pathways of dro...