Chonglei Hao

Bioinspired interfacial materials with enhanced drop mobility: From fundamentals to multifunctional applications

The development of bioinspired interfacial materials with enhanced drop mobility that mimic the innate functionalities of nature will have a significant impact on the energy, environment and global healthcare. Despite extensive progress, state of the art interfacial materials have not reached the level of maturity sufficient for industrial applications in terms of scalability, stability, and reliability. These are complicated by their operating environments and lack of facile approaches to control the local structural texture and chemical composition at multiple length scales. The recent advances in the fundamental understanding are reviewed, as well as practical applications of bioinspired interfacial materials, with an emphasis on the drop bouncing and coalescence-induced jumping behaviors. Perspectives on how to catalyze new discoveries and to foster technological adoption to move this exciting area forward are also suggested.

Electrowetting on liquid-infused film (EWOLF): Complete reversibility and controlled droplet oscillation suppression for fast optical imaging

Electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD) has emerged as a powerful tool to electrically manipulate tiny individual droplets in a controlled manner. Despite tremendous progress over the past two decades, current EWOD operating in ambient conditions has limited functionalities posing challenges for its applications, including electronic display, energy generation, and microfluidic systems. Here, we demonstrate a new paradigm of electrowetting on liquid-infused film (EWOLF) that allows for complete reversibility and tunable transient response simultaneously. We determine that these functionalities in EWOLF are attributed to its novel configuration, which allows for the formation of viscous liquid-liquid interfaces as well as additional wetting ridges, thereby suppressing the contact line pinning and severe droplet oscillation encountered in the conventional EWOD. Finally, by harnessing these functionalities demonstrated in EWOLF, we also explore its application as liquid lens for fast optical focusing.

Controlling drop bouncing using surfaces with gradient features

Drop hitting on superhydrophobic surfaces usually undergoes spreading and retraction stages before its complete rebound and there exists a minimum amount of time for the spreading and retraction processes. Impressively, it was recently shown that the so-called contact time can be significantly reduced by engineering surfaces with millimeter-scale tapered post arrays that allow the impinging drop to leave the surfaces in a pancake shape at the end of lateral spreading (pancake bouncing). Despite exciting progress, it remains elusive to rationally control the contact time and quantitatively predict the critical Weber number for the occurrence of pancake bouncing. Here, we experimentally demonstrated that the drop bouncing is intricately modulated by the surface morphology. Under the same centre-to-centre post spacing, surfaces with a larger apex angle could give rise to more robust pancake bouncing, which is characterized by significant contact time reduction, smaller critical Weber number, and wider Weber number range. We also developed simple harmonic spring models and theoretically revealed the dependence of timescales associated with the impinging drop and the critical Weber number for pancake bouncing on the surface morphology. The insights learned from this work will allow us to rationally design various surfaces for many practical applications.

On‐Site Formation of Emulsions by Controlled Air Plugs

Air plugs are usually undesirable in microfluidic systems because of their detrimental effect on the systems stability and integrity. By controlling the wetting properties as well as the topographical geometry of the microchannel, it is reported herein that air plugs can be generated in pre-defined locations to function as a unique valve, allowing for the on-site formation of various emulsions including single-component droplets, composite droplets with droplet-to-droplet concentration gradient, blood droplets, paired droplets, as well as bubble arrays without the need for precious flow control, a difficult task with conventional droplet microfluidics. Moreover, the self-generated air valve can be readily deactivated (turned off) by the introduction of an oil phase, allowing for the on-demand release of as-formed droplets for downstream applications. It is proposed that the simple, yet versatile nature of this technique can act as an important method for droplet microfluidics and, in particular, is ideal for the development of affordable lab-on-a-chip systems without suffering from scalability and manufacturing challenges that typically confound the conventional droplet microfluidics.

Bioinspired Materials: Bioinspired Interfacial Materials with Enhanced Drop Mobility: From Fundamentals to Multifunctional Applications (Small 14/2016).

The development of bioinspired interfacial materials with enhanced drop mobility that mimic the innate functionalities of nature will have significant impact on energy, environment, and global healthcare. On page 1825, Z. Wang and co-workers highlight recent advances in the fundamental understanding, as well as practical applications of bio-inspired interfacial materials, with an emphasis on drop bouncing and jumping behaviors.

Dynamic control of droplet jumping by tailoring nanoparticle concentrations

The dynamic impact behavior of droplets from solid surfaces has attracted increasing interest, especially propelled by the advances in the bio-inspired interfacial materials. In this work, we investigate the impact and bouncing dynamics of ethylene glycol droplets containing silica nanoparticles on superhydrophobic surfaces (SHS). We find that the rebounding of droplets from SHS is highly dependent on the impact velocity and suspension concentrations. By increasing the impact velocity or suspension concentrations, the probability of droplet bouncing from SHS is greatly reduced. The presence of nanoparticles can significantly increase the viscous energy dissipation inside the liquid droplets, therefore suppressing the jumping from surfaces. Based on the energy dissipation characterization, we also find the critical concentration to determine the manifestation of the viscous effect, above which the liquid suspensions exhibit non-Newtonian fluid properties. Our study provides an efficient approach to dynamic...