Superconfinement tailors fluid flow at microscales

Siti Aminah Setu, Roel P.A. Dullens, Aurora Hernández-Machado, Ignacio Pagonabarraga, Dirk G.A.L. Aarts () and Rodrigo Ledesma-Aguilar ()
Additional contact information
Siti Aminah Setu: Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford
Roel P.A. Dullens: Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford
Aurora Hernández-Machado: Departament d’Estructura i Constituents de la Matèria, Universitat de Barcelona
Ignacio Pagonabarraga: Departament de Física Fonamental, Universitat de Barcelona
Dirk G.A.L. Aarts: Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford
Rodrigo Ledesma-Aguilar: The Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Understanding fluid dynamics under extreme confinement, where device and intrinsic fluid length scales become comparable, is essential to successfully develop the coming generations of fluidic devices. Here we report measurements of advancing fluid fronts in such a regime, which we dub superconfinement. We find that the strong coupling between contact-line friction and geometric confinement gives rise to a new stability regime where the maximum speed for a stable moving front exhibits a distinctive response to changes in the bounding geometry. Unstable fronts develop into drop-emitting jets controlled by thermal fluctuations. Numerical simulations reveal that the dynamics in superconfined systems is dominated by interfacial forces. Henceforth, we present a theory that quantifies our experiments in terms of the relevant interfacial length scale, which in our system is the intrinsic contact-line slip length. Our findings show that length-scale overlap can be used as a new fluid-control mechanism in strongly confined systems.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8297 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms8297

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8297

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().