Controlling the interactions of drops on surfaces is essential to not only the basic understanding of various processes but also a variety of viable applications. Recently, the superhydrophobic surface has attracted much attention from researchers, due to its advantages on the contamination-free property and low adhesion between drop and surface during manipulation. However, the properties of such superhydrophobic surface are determined after fabrication, making the surface inapplicable to situations when on-demand behaviors of the drop are required, which is especially important in the applications of digital microfluidics. In this study, we utilized liquid-dielectrophoresis force to manipulate the drop on a superhydrophobic surface. Such control is found to be fast-response, bio-friendly, convenient, repeatable, and energy efficient. Adhesion force and rebounding for both static and dynamic interactions between drop and surface under electric field have been explored. To demonstrate the possible applications of the dielectrowetting on the superhydrophobic surface, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept experiment of drop sorting. The electric-field dependent drop manipulation enables potential applications for digital microfluidic, micro-reactor and advanced lap-on-a-drop platform.

Drop manipulation on superhydrophobic surface with dielectrowetting

2019 Fall National Meeting

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