Our every day experience of handling liquids is strongly linked to the presence of gravity. In a zero gravity environment, as realized during parabola flights or in space crafts, it is almost impossible to pour water from a bottle into a glass. A close look at a glass of water already reveals the influence of interfacial energies: the curvature of the water meniscus bends up close to its rim due to the high wettability of clean glass surfaces by water. When compartmentalized into structures smaller than a characteristic length being typically on the order of 1 mm gravity becomes irrelevant and interfacial energies dominate both the statics and dynamics of a liquid down to a length scale of about 10 nm [1].
The strong impact of interfacial energies on the morphology of submillimeter- sized wetting droplets can be utilized to control the position and the shape of tiny amounts of liquid on specifically designed substrates.
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© 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Brinkmann, M., Khare, K., Seemann, R. (2007). Control of Liquids by Surface Energies. In: Hardt, S., Schönfeld, F. (eds) Microfluidic Technologies for Miniaturized Analysis Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-68424-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-68424-6_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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Online ISBN: 978-0-387-68424-6
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