Electrowetting of liquid marbles

Newton, Michael, Herbertson, Dale, Elliott, Stephen, Shirtcliffe, Neil and McHale, Glen (2007) Electrowetting of liquid marbles. Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, 40 (1). pp. 20-24. ISSN 0022-3727

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0022-3727/40/1/S04

Abstract

Electrowetting of water drops on structured superhydrophobic surfaces are known to cause an irreversible change from a slippy (Cassie-Baxter) to a sticky (Wenzel) regime. An alternative approach to using a water drop on a superhydrophobic surface to obtain a non-wetting system is to use a liquid marble on a smooth solid substrate. A liquid marble is a droplet coated in hydrophobic grains, which therefore carries its own solid surface structure as a conformal coating. Such droplets can be considered as perfect non-wetting systems having contact angles to smooth solid substrates of close to 180 degrees. In this work we report the electrowetting of liquid marbles made of water coated with hydrophobic lycopodium grains and show that the electrowetting is completely reversible. Marbles are shown to return to their initial contact angle for both ac and dc electrowetting and without requiring a threshold voltage to be exceeded. Furthermore, we provide a proof-of-principle demonstration that controlled motion of marbles on a finger electrode structure is possible.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: liquid marble, wetting, electrowetting
Subjects: F100 Chemistry
F200 Materials Science
F300 Physics
H600 Electronic and Electrical Engineering
Department: Faculties > Engineering and Environment > Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering
Depositing User: Glen McHale
Date Deposited: 16 Aug 2012 15:54
Last Modified: 17 Dec 2023 12:48
URI: https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/8321

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