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Counterintuitive Ballistic and Directional Liquid Transport on a Flexible Droplet Rectifier.

ABSTRACT: Achieving the directional and long-range droplet transport on solid surfaces is widely preferred for many practical applications but has proven to be challenging. Particularly, directionality and transport distance of droplets on hydrophobic surfaces are mutually exclusive. Here, we report that drain fly, a ubiquitous insect maintaining nonwetting property even in very high humidity, develops a unique ballistic droplet transport mechanism to meet these demanding challenges. The drain fly serves as a flexible rectifier to allow for a directional and long-range propagation as well as self-removal of a droplet, thus suppressing unwanted liquid flooding. Further investigation reveals that this phenomenon is owing to the synergistic conjunction of multiscale roughness, structural periodicity, and flexibility, which rectifies the random and localized droplet nucleation (nanoscale and microscale) into a directed and global migration (millimeter-scale). The mechanism we have identified opens up a new approach toward the design of artificial rectifiers for broad applications.

SUBMITTER: Wang L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7453356 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Counterintuitive Ballistic and Directional Liquid Transport on a Flexible Droplet Rectifier.

Wang Lei L Li Jing J Zhang Bo B Feng Shile S Zhang Mei M Wu Dong D Lu Yang Y Kai Ji Jung JJ Liu Jing J Wang Zuankai Z Jiang Lei L

Research (Washington, D.C.) 20200819

Achieving the directional and long-range droplet transport on solid surfaces is widely preferred for many practical applications but has proven to be challenging. Particularly, directionality and transport distance of droplets on hydrophobic surfaces are mutually exclusive. Here, we report that drain fly, a ubiquitous insect maintaining nonwetting property even in very high humidity, develops a unique ballistic droplet transport mechanism to meet these demanding challenges. The drain fly serves ...[more]

PMID: 32885170

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Project description:The ballistic regime of vibrational energy transport in oligomeric molecular chains occurs with a constant, often high, transport speed and high efficiency. Such a transport regime can be initiated by exciting a chain end group with a mid-infrared (IR) photon. To better understand the wavepacket formation process, two chemically identical end groups, azido groups with normal, 14N3-, and isotopically substituted, 15N3-, nitrogen atoms, were tested for wavepacket initiation in compounds with alkyl chains of n = 5, 10, and 15 methylene units terminated with a carboxylic acid (-a) group, denoted as 14N3Cn-a and 15N3Cn-a. The transport was initiated by exciting the azido moiety stretching mode, the νN≡N tag, at 2100 cm-1 (14N3Cn-a) or 2031 cm-1 (15N3Cn-a). Opposite to the expectation, the ballistic transport speed was found to decrease upon 14N3 → 15N3 isotope editing. Three mechanisms of the transport initiation of a vibrational wavepacket are described and analyzed. The first mechanism involves the direct formation of a wavepacket via excitation with IR photons of several strong Fermi resonances of the tag mode with the νN═N + νN-C combination state while each of the combination state components is mixed with delocalized chain states. The second mechanism relies on the vibrational relaxation of an end-group-localized tag into a mostly localized end-group state that is strongly coupled to multiple delocalized states of a chain band. Harmonic mixing of νN═N of the azido group with CH2 wagging states of the chain permits a wavepacket formation within a portion of the wagging band, suggesting a fast transport speed. The third mechanism involves the vibrational relaxation of an end-group-localized mode into chain states. Two such pathways were found for the νN≡N initiation: The νN═N mode relaxes efficiently into the twisting band states and low-frequency acoustic modes, and the νN-C mode relaxes into the rocking band states and low-frequency acoustic modes. The contributions of the three initiation mechanisms in the ballistic energy transport initiated by νN≡N tag are quantitatively evaluated and related to the experiment. We conclude that the third mechanism dominates the transport in alkane chains of 5-15 methylene units initiated with the νN≡N tag and the wavepacket generated predominantly at the CH2 twisting band. The isotope effect of the transport speed is attributed to a larger contribution of the faster wavepackets for 14N3Cn-a or to the different breadth of the wavepacket within the twisting band. The study offers a systematic description of different transport initiation mechanisms and discusses the requirements and features of each mechanism. Such analysis will be useful for designing novel materials for energy management.

Dataset Information

Counterintuitive Ballistic and Directional Liquid Transport on a Flexible Droplet Rectifier.

Publications

Counterintuitive Ballistic and Directional Liquid Transport on a Flexible Droplet Rectifier.

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