Capillarity: revisiting the fundamentals of liquid marbles
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REVIEW
Capillarity: revisiting the fundamentals of liquid marbles Pradip Singha1 · Chin Hong Ooi1 · Nhat‑Khuong Nguyen1 · Kamalalayam Rajan Sreejith1 · Jing Jin1 · Nam‑Trung Nguyen1 Received: 11 June 2020 / Accepted: 1 September 2020 / Published online: 23 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Liquid marble, an emerging platform for digital microfluidics, has shown its potential in biomedical applications, cosmetics, and chemical industries. Recently, the manipulation and fundamental aspects of liquid marbles have been reported and attracted attention from the microfluidics community. Insights into their physical and chemical properties allow liquid marbles to be utilised in practical applications. This review summarises and revisits the effect of capillarity on the formation of liquid marbles and how it affects the effective surface tension as well as their robustness. The paper also systematically discusses the applied aspect of capillarity of the carrier liquid for transporting floating liquid marbles. Keywords Liquid marble · Surface tension · Capillarity · Digital microfluidics
1 Introduction Microfluidics is the science and technology dealing with the manipulation of fluid in sub-millimeter/micrometer scale. Microfluidics enables the implementation of liquid handling process on a single device (Whitesides 2006). Microfluidics has a broad range of applications from lab on a chip for point of care diagnostics to cell culture organ on a chip. It is well known that the liquid flow may behave differently in the microscale. For instance, in most cases liquid flow is laminar in the microscale and body forces, such as weight, are negligible compared to the dominant surface tension. The unique microscale behaviours open up subtopics in microfluidics, leading to applications in chemical engineering, biomedicines, and cosmetics (Bormashenko 2011; McHale and Newton 2011; Nguyen et al. 2019; Nguyen and Wu 2004; Oliveira et al. 2017; Ooi and Nguyen 2015). Recently, digital microfluidics (DMF) has been emerging as a liquid handling technology that manipulates discrete droplets (Choi et al. 2012). This technology offers several advantages over the conventional continuous flow microfluidics, such as minimum reagent requirement, fast response, and the ability to scale up through parallelisation (Nguyen * Nam‑Trung Nguyen nam‑[email protected] 1
Queensland Micro‑ and Nanotechnology Centre, Griffith University, 170 Kessels Road, Nathan, QLD 4111, Australia
et al. 2017; Samiei et al. 2016). Droplets can be manipulated with active approaches, such as electrowetting (Teng et al. 2020), dielectrophoresis (Velev et al. 2003), thermocapillary effect (Chen et al. 2005), acoustic vibration (Chen et al. 2017; Zang et al. 2015), and magneto-wetting (Nguyen et al. 2010a). However, evaporation, handling, contamination, and surface modification remain current challenges. Liquid marble-based DMF has been utilised as a novel microfluidic platform to address the abovementioned
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