We present a colourimetric litmus test for simple differentiation of organic liquids based on wetting, which achieves chemical specificity without a significant sacrifice in portability or ease-of-use. Chemical specificity is derived from the combination of colourimetric wetting patterns produced by liquids in an array of inverse opal films, each having a graded wettability, but using different...

Fundamental understanding of the self-assembly of domains in block copolymers (BCPs) and capabilities in control of these processes are important for their use as nanoscale templates in various applications. This paper focuses on the self-assembly of spin-cast and printed poly(styrene-block-methyl methacrylate) BCPs on patterned surface wetting layers formed by electrohydrodynamic jet printing ...

A maskless and programmable direct electron beam writing method is reported for making high-precision superhydrophilic-superhydrophobic wetting patterns with 152° contact angle contrast using an environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM). The smallest linewidth achieved is below 1 μm. The reported effects of the electron beam induced local plasma may also influence a variety of microscop...

Surface modification is a promising method to solve the tribological problems in microsystems. To modify the surface, we fabricated hierarchical patterns with different pitches of nano-scale features and different surface chemistries. Micro- and nano-patterns with similar geometrical configurations were also fabricated for comparison. The nano-tribological behavior of the patterns was investiga...

Internal pipeline corrosion in oil production and transportation is always associated with the presence of water, and the likelihood of corrosion generally increases with the volume fraction of water. When the walls of the pipeline are wetted with oil no corrosion is possible. Highly turbulent flow was associated with negligible corrosion due to water entrainment by the flowing oil, whereas low...

Analysis of a microscopic Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson model of 3D short-ranged wetting shows that correlation functions are characterized by two length scales, not one, as previously thought. This has a simple diagrammatic explanation using a nonlocal interfacial Hamiltonian and yields a thermodynamically consistent theory of wetting in keeping with exact sum rules. For critical wetting the second l...

Even a single-component liquid may have more than two liquid states. The transition between them is called a 'liquid-liquid transition' (LLT). Such LLTs have recently attracted considerable attention mainly because of the fundamental interest in the physical origin of this counter-intuitive phenomenon. In this study, we report the first observation of wetting effects on LLT for a molecular liqu...