Colloidal deposits from evaporating sessile droplets:Coffee ring versus surface capture

Suppression of the coffee ring effect is desirable in many industrial applications which utilize colloidal deposition from an evaporating liquid. Here we focus on the role of particle arrest at the liquid-air interface (surface capture) which occurs at high evaporation rates. It is known experimentally that this phenomenon inhibits particles from reaching the contact line, leading to a deposit which is closer to uniform. We are able to describe this effect using a simple 1D modeling framework and, utilizing asymptotic theory, parametrize our model by the ratio of the vertical advection and diffusion timescales. We show that our model is consistent with existing frameworks for small values of this parameter, but also predicts the surface layer formation seen experimentally at high evaporation rates. The formation of a surface layer leads to a deposit morphology which mimics the evaporative flux density and so is closest to uniform when evaporation has a constant strength across the liquid-air interface.</p

Application of microfluidic systems in modelling impacts of environmental structure on stress-sensing by individual microbial cells

Environmental structure describes physical structure that can determine heterogenous spatial distribution of biotic and abiotic (nutrients, stressors etc.) components of a microorganism's microenvironment. This study investigated the impact of micrometre-scale structure on microbial stress sensing, using yeast cells exposed to copper in microfluidic devices comprising either complex soil-like architectures or simplified environmental structures. In the soil micromodels, the responses of individual cells to inflowing medium supplemented with high copper (using cells expressing a copper-responsive pCUP1-reporter fusion) could be described neither by spatial metrics developed to quantify proximity to environmental structures and surrounding space, nor by computational modelling of fluid flow in the systems. In contrast, the proximities of cells to structures did correlate with their responses to elevated copper in microfluidic chambers that contained simplified environmental structure. Here, cells within more open spaces showed the stronger responses to the copper-supplemented inflow. These insights highlight not only the importance of structure for microbial responses to their chemical environment, but also how predictive modelling of these interactions can depend on complexity of the system, even when deploying controlled laboratory conditions and microfluidics

Droplet coalescence is initiated by thermal motion

The classical notion of the coalescence of two droplets of the same radius R is that surface tension drives an initially singular flow. In this Letter we show, using molecular dynamics simulations of coalescing water nanodroplets, that after single or multiple bridges form due to the presence of thermal capillary waves, the bridge growth commences in a thermal regime. Here, the bridges expand linearly in time much faster than the viscous-capillary speed due to collective molecular jumps near the bridge fronts. Transition to the classical hydrodynamic regime only occurs once the bridge radius exceeds a thermal length scale lT∼√R