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 EW-induced droplet actuation has, however, remained largely unexplored owing to several challeng...

This paper reports a novel combination of hydrophilic/hydrophobic materials for the evolution of liquid manipulation. Droplet generation based on a hydrophilic/hydrophobic mechanism is a promising method for highly accurate liquid manipulations. Although several droplet manipulation devices utilizing hydrophilic/hydrophobic patterns have been reported, it has been difficult to split fluid into ...

Title of Document: INTERACTION OF INTENSE LASER PULSES WITH DROPLET AND CLUSTER SOURCES: APPLICATION TO EXTREME ULTRAVIOLET LITHOGRAPHY AND PLASMA WAVEGUIDE GENERATION Hua Sheng, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Directed By: Professor Howard M. Milchberg Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering & Institute for Physical Science and Technology Several topics were studied in the interaction of ...

A viscous liquid film coating a fibre becomes unstable and decays into droplets due to the Rayleigh-Plateau instability (RPI). Here, we report on the generation of uniform droplets on a hydrophobized fibre by taking advantage of this effect. In the late stages of liquid column breakup, a three-phase contact line can be formed at one side of the droplet by spontaneous rupture of the thinning fil...

This thesis presents the design for a piezoelectric droplet generator capable of producing highly repeatable droplets ranging from 0.60 mm to 1.60 mm in diameter. The generator is low cost, simple to fabricate, and easily reproducible for use in other fluids experiments. A series of experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of various operating parameters on the droplet generation p...

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...

High-speed video imaging was used to study the dynamic behavior of cavitation bubbles induced by a continuous wave (CW) laser into highly absorbing water droplets containing copper nitrate (CuNO4). The droplet lays horizontally on a glass surface and the laser beam (λ=975 nm) propagates vertically from underneath, across the glass and into the droplet. This beam is focused z=400 μm above the gl...

Digital microfluidics, the use of small sample droplets in oil filled channels, offers exciting possibilities in biochemistry. With the ability to form nano or picolitre droplets, there is potential for massive miniaturisation of high throughput screening (HTS) processes, where the full functionality of microtitre plate technology is replicated on a single chip for improved efficiency and subst...

We propose an experimental setup allowing for the characterization of laser droplet generation in terms of the underlying dynamics, primarily showing that the latter is deterministically chaotic by means of nonlinear time series analysis methods. In particular, we use a laser pulse to melt the end of a properly fed vertically placed metal wire. Due to the interplay of surface tension, gravity f...