Electrowetting on dielectric and superhydrophobic surface: lattice Boltzmann study

We have witnessed rapid and exciting development in electrowetting (EW) or electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) since 1990s. Owing to its great advantages such as easy operation, sensitive response and electrical reversibility, EW has found many applications in various fields, especially in micro- and nano-fluidics, electronic display, etc. The aim of this review is to inspire new investigations on EW, not only in theory and numerical simulation, but also in experiments, and spur further research on EW for more practical applications. A comprehensive review is presented on the EW research progress, and experiments, theoretical modeling and numerical simulations are covered. After a brief look at the development history, some latest experimental and simulation methods, such as Lattice Boltzmann method, phase-field method and molecular dynamics (MD), are introduced. Some representative practical applications are then presented. Unresolved issues and prospects on EW as the final part of this review are expected to attract more attention and inspire more in-depth studies in this fascinating area.

This paper describes effect of characteristics of dielectric layer on performances of droplet transport in EWOD (Electro wetting on dielectric) microfluidic devices. EWOD is a technology for manipulating droplets discretely by controlling the surface wettability electrically. Films of Parylene C, PDMS, and SU-8 were prepared for the dielectric layer and effects of deposition method, thickness and permittivity of these films were investigated experimentally. The results show that water droplets can be easily transported at low voltage when the dielectric film with high permittivity is deposited thinly and uniformly.

In this paper, we study the electrowetting effect of superhydrophobic SU-8 film as the dielectric for Electrowetting-on-Dielectric (EWOD). The change of apparent contact angle (APCA) on superhydrophobic surface in electrowetting systems was measured and analyzed using a modified Lippmann-Yong equation. The variation of APCA between droplet and device surface under various DC voltage and AC voltage of different frequencies was fully experimented. The experimental results were in good agreement with the theoretical predictions. This study shows the potential of using superhydrophobic SU-8 film as the dielectric layer in high-performance EWOD devices.

An electrowetting on dielectrics based lab-on-a-chip utilizing an integrated high fundamental frequency quartz crystal resonator as a biosensor

With the development of micro chemical and medical analysis in MEMS, micro-fluid-control chip becomes more and more popular. Based on discrete droplet control system, chemical and medical analysis is applied in the micro chip lab. The change of voltage between the dielectric layer of the electrode controls the wettability of a droplet on a dielectric solid surface and then makes it possible to create,transport,merge and cut the micro droplets. This paper presents a numerical method to simulate the droplet motion by electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD). The second-order projection method is carried out to solve N-S equations and level set function. The interface is captured as zero level set. Dynamic contact angle for fluid contacting a solid surface by the electric potential is used to evaluate the wettability of fluid by EWOD. The numerical scheme is based on staggered MAC grid. Numerical simulations are used to capture the interface between two kinds of fluids in micro channels, the shapes of micro droplets resting on the horizontal solid surface under different electric potential and the transportation of a micro droplet in a parallel-plate channel when electrodes are activated.

Active surface tension driven micropump using droplet/meniscus pressure gradient

Lattice Boltzmann simulations for self-propelled jumping of droplets after coalescence on a superhydrophobic surface

Defrosting is essential for removing frost from engineering surfaces, but some fundamental issues are still unclear, especially for defrosting on superhydrophobic surfaces. Here, defrosting experiments on prepared superhydrophobic surfaces were conducted along with the investigation on meltwater evolution characteristics. According to the experiments, the typical meltwater evolution process on superhydrophobic surfaces can be divided into two stages: dewetting by edge curling and dewetting by shrinkage. The edge curling of a meltwater film is a distinct phenomenon and has been first reported in this work. Profiting from the ultralow adhesion of the superhydrophobic surface, edge curling is mainly attributed to two unbalanced forces (one at the interface between the ice slurry layer and pure water layer and the other in the triple phase line area) acting on the layered meltwater film. During the multi-meltwater evolution process, the nonbreaking of chained droplets on superhydrophobic surfaces is also an interesting phenomenon, which is controlled by the interaction between the surface tension and the retentive force because of contact angle hysteresis. An approximate criterion was then developed to explain and determine the status of chained droplets, and experimental data from various surfaces have validated the effectiveness of this criterion. This work may deepen the understanding of defrosting on superhydrophobic surfaces and promote antifrosting/icing applications in engineering.

In this paper, oblique impact of a single rain droplet on super-hydrophobic surface with randomly distributed rough structures was investigated by lattice Boltzmann method. The effects of the impact angle of the droplet as well as the skewness and kurtosis of rough surface on the bouncing ability of the droplet were in this paper. It was found that the oblique impact can effectively reduce the contact time in the process of droplet bouncing off, because the energy consumption caused by the pinning effect is reduced. Moreover, the contact time most possibly reaches the shortest when the impact angle is 45°. Decreasing the skewness and keeping the kurtosis around 4.0 can enhance the bouncing ability during the droplet oblique impact on randomly distributed rough surfaces. The results are useful for the design of building structures.

The lattice Boltzmann method is used to simulate numerically the droplet motion driven by Marangoni effect, which is induced by surface tension gradient on the solid-liquid interface, with the consideration of interaction between solid and liquid molecules. The computation results are well compared with the theoretical prediction available for smaller surface tension gradient, whereas the translation velocity of droplet is smaller than the theoretical value for larger gradient, because some assumptions, such as the quasi-equilibrium and non-deformable droplet, are not satisfied in the theoretical analysis anymore. Vortical structure with a solid-like core is found in the droplet when it moves to the hydrophilic end. The variations of velocity and contact angle of droplet are found to be oscillating with time for larger gradient of wettability.

Microwater droplet splitting and merging in a parallel-plate electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) device have been studied numerically. The transient governing equations for the microfluidic flow are solved by a finite volume scheme with a two-step projection method on a fixed computational domain. The interface between liquid and gas is tracked by a coupled level set (LS) and volume-of-fluid (CLSVOF) method. A continuum surface force (CSF) model is employed to model the surface tension at the interface. Contact angle hysteresis which is an essential component in EWOD modeling is implemented together with a simplified model for the viscous stresses exerted by the two plates at the solid–liquid interface. The results of the numerical model have been validated with published experimental data and the physics of droplet motion within the EWOD device has been examined. A parametric study has been performed in which the effects of channel height and several other parameters on the fluid motion have been studied.

Investigation of CO2 and CH4 capture from syngas in adsorption process and breakthrough modeling by modified Lattice-Boltzmann mesoscale method

We consider a small droplet of water sitting on top of a heated superhydrophobic surface. A toroidal convection pattern develops in which fluid is observed to rise along the surface of the spherical droplet and to accelerate downwards in the interior towards the liquid/solid contact point. The internal dynamics arise due to the presence of a vertical temperature gradient; this leads to a gradient in surface tension which in turn drives fluid away from the contact point along the interface. We develop a solution to this thermocapillary-driven Marangoni flow analytically in terms of streamfunctions. Quantitative comparisons between analytical and experimental results, as well as effective heat transfer coefficients, are presented.

In recent years electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) has become an effective tool to control partial wetting. EWOD uses the liquid-solid interface as part of a capacitive structure that allows capacitive and interfacial energies to adjust by changes in wetting when the liquid-solid interface is charged due to an applied voltage. An important aspect of EWOD has been its applications in microfluidics in chemistry and biology and in optical devices and displays in physics and engineering. Many of these rely on the use of a liquid droplet immersed in a second liquid due to the need either for neutral buoyancy to overcome gravity and shield against impact shocks or to encapsulate the droplet for other reasons, such as in microfluidic-based DNA analyses. Recently, it has been shown that nonwetting oleophobic surfaces can be forcibly wetted by nonconducting oils using nonuniform electric fields and an interface-localized form of liquid dielectrophoresis (dielectrowetting). Here we show that this effect can be used to create films of oil immersed in a second immiscible fluid of lower permittivity. We predict that the square of the thickness of the film should obey a simple law dependent on the square of the applied voltage and with strength dependent on the ratio of difference in permittivity to the liquid-fluid interfacial tension, Δε/γ(LF). This relationship is experimentally confirmed for 11 liquid-air and liquid-liquid combinations with Δε/γ(LF) having a span of more than two orders of magnitude. We therefore provide fundamental understanding of dielectrowetting for liquid-in-liquid systems and also open up a new method to determine liquid-liquid interfacial tensions.

Hierarchical roughness is known to effectively reduce the liquid-solid contact area and water droplet adhesion on superhydrophobic surfaces, which can be seen for example in the combination of submicrometer and micrometer scale structures on the lotus leaf. The submicrometer scale fine structures, which are often referred to as nanostructures in the literature, have an important role in the phenomenon of superhydrophobicity and low water droplet adhesion. Although the fine structures are generally termed as nanostructures, their actual dimensions are often at the submicrometer scale of hundreds of nanometers. Here we demonstrate that small nanometric structures can have very different effect on surface wetting compared to the large submicrometer scale structures. Hierarchically rough superhydrophobic TiO(2) nanoparticle surfaces generated by the liquid flame spray (LFS) on board and paper substrates revealed that the nanoscale surface structures have the opposite effect on the droplet adhesion compared to the larger submicrometer and micrometer scale structures. Variation in the hierarchical structure of the nanoparticle surfaces contributed to varying droplet adhesion between the high- and low-adhesive superhydrophobic states. Nanoscale structures did not contribute to superhydrophobicity, and there was no evidence of the formation of the liquid-solid-air composite interface around the nanostructures. Therefore, larger submicrometer and micrometer scale structures were needed to decrease the liquid-solid contact area and to cause the superhydrophobicity. Our study suggests that a drastic wetting transition occurs on superhydrophobic surfaces at the nanometre scale; i.e., the transition between the Cassie-Baxter and Wenzel wetting states will occur as the liquid-solid-air composite interface collapses around nanoscale structures. Consequently, water adheres tightly to the surface by penetrating into the nanostructure. The droplet adhesion mechanism presented in this paper gives valuable insight into a phenomenon of simultaneous superhydrophobicity and high water droplet adhesion and contributes to a more detailed comprehension of superhydrophobicity overall.