No Arabic abstract
Although a hydrophobic microtexture at a solid surface most often reflects rain owing to the presence of entrapped air within the texture, it is much more challenging to repel hot water. As it contacts a colder material, hot water generates condensation within the cavities at the solid surface, which eventually builds bridges between the substrate and the water, and thus destroys repellency. Here we show that both small (~100 nm) and large (~10 mu m) model features do reflect hot drops at any drop temperature and in the whole range of explored impact velocities. Hence, we can define two structural recipes for repelling hot water: drops on nanometric features hardly stick owing to the miniaturization of water bridges, whereas kinetics of condensation in large features is too slow to connect the liquid to the solid at impact.
By revisiting the century-old problem of water bridge, we demonstrate that it is in fact dynamic and comprises of two coaxial water currents that carry different charges and flow in opposite directions. This spontaneous separation is triggered by the different stages to construct the water bridge. Initially, a flow is facilitated by the cone jet that is powered by H+ and flows out of the positive-electrode beaker. An opposing cone-jet from negative beaker is established later and forced to take the outer route. This spontaneous arrangement of two-way flow is revealed by using fluorescein and carbon powder as tracers, and the Particle Image Velocimetry, These two opposing flows are found to carry non-equal flux that results in a net transport of water to the negative beaker. We manage to estimate the flow speed and cross-sectional area of these co-axial flows as a function of time and applied voltage. Note that the water on the outer layer functions as a millimeter tube that confines and interacts strongly with the flow inside. This provides a first natural and yet counter example to the recently reported near-frictionless flow in an equally miniatureized soft wall made from ferrofluid.
We investigate the radial thermocapillary flow driven by a laser-heated microbead in partial wetting at the water-air interface. Particular attention is paid to the evolution of the convective flow patterns surrounding the hot sphere as the latter is increasingly heated. The flow morphology is nearly axisymmetric at low laser power P. Increasing P leads to symmetry breaking with the onset of counter-rotating vortex pairs. The boundary condition at the interface, close to no-slip in the low-P regime, turns about stress-free between the vortex pairs in the high-P regime. These observations strongly support the view that surface-active impurities are inevitably adsorbed on the water surface where they form an elastic layer. The onset of vortex pairs is the signature of a hydrodynamic instability in the layer response to the centrifugal forced flow. Interestingly, our study paves the way for the design of active colloids able to achieve high-speed self-propulsion via vortex pair generation at a liquid interface.
The orientational dynamics of inertialess anisotropic particles transported by two-dimensional convective turbulent flows display a coexistence of regular and chaotic features. We numerically demonstrate that very elongated particles (rods) align preferentially with the direction of the fluid flow, i.e., horizontally close to the isothermal walls and dominantly vertically in the bulk. This behaviour is due to the the presence of a persistent large scale circulation flow structure, which induces strong shear at wall boundaries and in up/down-welling regions. The near-wall horizontal alignment of rods persists at increasing the Rayleigh number, while the vertical orientation in the bulk is progressively weakened by the corresponding increase of turbulence intensity. Furthermore, we show that very elongated particles are nearly orthogonal to the orientation of the temperature gradient, an alignment independent of the system dimensionality and which becomes exact only in the limit of infinite Prandtl number. Tumbling rates are extremely vigorous adjacent to the walls, where particles roughly perform Jeffery orbits. This implies that the root-mean-square near-wall tumbling rates for spheres are much stronger than for rods, up to $mathcal{O}(10)$ times at $Rasimeq 10^9$. In the turbulent bulk the situation reverses and rods tumble slightly faster than isotropic particles, in agreement with earlier observations in two-dimensional turbulence.
Artificial phoretic particles swim using self-generated gradients in chemical species (self-diffusiophoresis) or charges and currents (self-electrophoresis). These particles can be used to study the physics of collective motion in active matter and might have promising applications in bioengineering. In the case of self-diffusiophoresis, the classical physical model relies on a steady solution of the diffusion equation, from which chemical gradients, phoretic flows and ultimately the swimming velocity, may be derived. Motivated by disk-shaped particles in thin films and under confinement, we examine the extension to two dimensions. Because the two-dimensional diffusion equation lacks a steady state with the correct boundary conditions, Laplace transforms must be used to study the long-time behavior of the problem and determine the swimming velocity. For fixed chemical fluxes on the particle surface, we find that the swimming velocity ultimately always decays logarithmically in time. In the case of finite Peclet numbers, we solve the full advection-diffusion equation numerically and show that this decay can be avoided by the particle moving to regions of unconsumed reactant. Finite advection thus regularizes the two-dimensional phoretic problem.
We study the dynamics of torque driven spherical spinners settled on a surface, and demonstrate that hydrodynamic interactions at finite Reynolds numbers can lead to a concentration dependent and non-uniform crystallisation. At semi-dilute concentrations, we observe a rapid formation of a uniform hexagonal structure in the spinner monolayer. We attribute this to repulsive hydrodynamic interactions created by the secondary flow of the spinning particles. Increasing the surface coverage leads to a state with two co-existing spinner densities. The uniform hexagonal structure deviates into a high density crystalline structure surrounded by a continuous lower density hexatically ordered state. We show that this phase separation occurs due to a non-monotonic hydrodynamic repulsion, arising from a concentration dependent spinning frequency.