Search

The complex fluidic nature of blood, though necessary to serve different physiological purposes, gives rise to daunting challenges in developing unified conceptual paradigm describing the underlying physics of blood at pinch, which may otherwise be essential for understanding various bio-technological processes demanding precise and efficient handling of blood samples. Intuitively, a blood-drop may be formed simply by dripping. However, the pinch-off dynamics leading to blood-drop-breakup is elusively more complex than what may be portrayed by any unique model depicting the underlying morpho-dynamics, as our study reveals. With blood samples, here we observe two distinctive modes of the breakup process. One mode corresponds to incessant collapsing of a liquid-neck, while in other mode formation and thinning of an extended long thread leads to the breakup and drop formation. We further show that these modes are respectively described by power law and exponential law based universal scaling dynamics, depicting the temporal evolution of the neck thickness of the blood filament. Our results are likely to bear far-reaching consequences in diverse applications, ranging from forensic sciences to droplet based microfluidic technology., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures

Droplets confined in a microfluidic channel often exhibit intriguing shapes, primarily attributable to complex hydrodynamic interactions over small scales. We show that effect of varied substrate wettability conditions may further complicate these interactions remarkably, and often non-trivially. Our studies reveal that the combined influence of substrate wettability and fluidic confinement eventually culminates towards influencing the droplet transients, distortion of the local shear flow field, as well as drop stabilization against breakup or detachment, allowing one to develop different regimes of shapes evolution that are fascinatingly distinct from the ones reported in earlier studies on drop breakup in micro-confined shear flows. We further demonstrate that combined consequences of wall effects and interfacial wettability characteristics can be exploited to pattern microfluidic substrates with pre-designed patches, bearing far-ranging scientific and technological consequences in several scientific and technological applications of contemporary relevance., Comment: Article: 14 pages, 3 figures; Supplementary: 2 pages, 1 figure

We account for the presence of surface charges towards describing variations in the dynamic contact angle of an advancing liquid-gas meniscus. Starting from the thin-film based formalism, we present closed-form analytical expressions relating the dynamic contact-angle with the capillary number (essentially normalized contact-line speed) and other interfacial parameters. Specifically, our analysis presents, within the realm of hydrodynamic paradigm, a connection between the micro- and macro-scale physics at the vicinity of the contact-line region, taking the combined confluence of viscous and capillary forces along with van der Waals and electrostatic interactions. This connection rationalizes the hitherto reported anomalous window of the magnitude of the microscopic length scales required to corroborate experimental data for ionic liquids. Moreover, our analysis shows the possibility of a transition from strong to weak influence of surface charge in a dynamic fashion with contact-line speed along with other electrochemical parameters, leading towards substantiating the reported multiple asymptotic behavior of dynamic contact-angle over a wide range of capillary numbers., Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures

We analyze the migration characteristics of a droplet in an oscillatory flow field in a parallel plate micro-confinement. Using phase filed formalism, we capture the dynamical evolution of the droplet over a wide range of the frequency of the imposed oscillation in the flow field, drop size relative to the channel gap, and the capillary number. The latter two factors imply the contribution of droplet deformability, commonly considered in the study of droplet migration under steady shear flow conditions. We show that the imposed oscillation brings in additional time complexity in the droplet movement, realized through temporally varying drop-shape, flow direction and the inertial response of the droplet. As a consequence, we observe a spatially complicated pathway of the droplet along the transverse direction, in sharp contrast to the smooth migration under a similar yet steady shear flow condition. Intuitively, the longitudinal component of the droplet movement is in tandem with the flow continuity and evolves with time at the same frequency as that of the imposed oscillation, although, with an amplitude decreasing with the frequency. The time complexity of the transverse component of the movement pattern, however, cannot by rationalized through such intuitive arguments. Towards bringing out the underlying physics, we further endeavor in a reciprocal identity based analysis. Following this approach, we unveil the time complexities of the droplet movement, which appear to be sufficient to rationalize the complex movement patterns observed through the comprehensive simulation studies. These results can be of profound importance in designing droplet based microfluidic systems in an oscillatory flow environment., Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures