Sumesh P. Thampi

We show the occurrence of two distinguished classical regimes of wetting, namely, Laplace and solutal Marangoni, during the spreading of oil drops on a surfactant-laden aqueous phase in a single surfactant-oil-water system. The spreading kinetics is found to follow a power-law behavior not only in the Laplace and Marangoni regimes, but also in the transition regime. Our experimental findings are corroborated with the scaling laws. The results demonstrate that increasing the surfactant concentration across the critical micelle concentration is instrumental to obtain the Laplace to Marangoni transition. Moreover, this transition does not depend on surfactant chemistry; instead, it depends on the adsorption/desorption kinetics of surfactant molecules to/from the interfaces that are created or annihilated during drop spreading.

Drying drops of colloidal dispersions have attracted attention from researchers since the nineteenth century. The multiscale nature of the problem involving physics at different scales, namely colloidal and interfacial phenomena as well as heat, mass, and momentum transport processes, combined with the seemingly simple yet nontrivial shape of the drops makes drying drop problems rich and interesting. The scope of such studies widens as the physical and chemical nature of dispersed entities in the drop vary and as evaporation occurs in more complex configurations. This review summarizes past and contemporary developments in the field, emphasizing the physicochemical and hydrodynamical principles that govern the processes occurring within a drying drop and the resulting variety of patterns generated on the substrate.

Dense active matter, from bacterial suspensions and microtubule bundles driven by motor proteins to cellular monolayers and synthetic Janus particles, is characterized by mesoscale turbulence, which is the emergence of chaotic flow structures. By immersing an ordered array of symmetric rotors in an active fluid, we introduce a microfluidic system that exploits spontaneous symmetry breaking in mesoscale turbulence to generate work. The lattice of rotors self-organizes into a spin state where neighboring discs continuously rotate in permanent alternating directions due to combined hydrodynamic and elastic effects. Our virtual prototype demonstrates a new research direction for the design of micromachines powered by the nematohydrodynamic properties of active turbulence.

Patterns generated by controlled evaporation of droplets containing colloids are dictated by internally generated flows. This advective particle transport is crucial to the efficacy of printing and coating processes and is also an elegant route to the self-assembly of particles. We propose a novel particle transport route, which involves adsorption of particles to the interface and subsequent curvature-driven migration of the particles along the interface. This interface-mediated transport can be exploited to control the distribution of particles in the dried patterns, which we experimentally elucidate by achieving gravity-induced drop shape changes. Our experiments demonstrate that the interplay between the bulk and the interfacial transport leads to strikingly different patterns: while dried aqueous sessile drops of colloidal dispersions produce well known "coffee-rings", dried pendant drops lead to "coffee-eyes". We support our experimental findings using scaling arguments. In previous studies, the effect of gravity-induced change in drop shape on the patterns formed in drying drops has been neglected. However, we show that the structure of the patterns formed by the colloidal particles after solvent evaporation is markedly different when the drops are deformed by gravity.

The development of size-efficient and cost-effective micropumps is an important problem given their wide applications. However, efficient designs are difficult to realise practically due to the complex machining required at small length scales. Here, we use Taylor's swimming sheet as an exemplar to show that the collective behavior of simple constructs like rotating particles can capture much of the rich behavior exhibited by microorganisms, and propose a compact and easy-to-make micropump based on the swimming sheet. We use analytical techniques and dissipative particle dynamics simulations to show that a staggered arrangement of rotating particles can emulate the flow characteristics of the swimming sheet and work as a micropump. Our analytical calculations, based on two approximate approaches, predict the dependence of the flow rate on control parameters.

We perform lattice Boltzmann simulations of an active nematic fluid confined in a two-dimensional channel to study the range of flow states that are stabilised by the confinement: unidirectional flow, oscillatory flow, the dancing state, localised active turbulence and fully-developed active turbulence. We analyse the flows in Fourier space, and measure a range of different length scales which describe the flows. We argue that the different states occur as a result of flow instabilities inherent to the system. As a consequence the characteristic length scale for oscillatory flow, the dancing state and localised active turbulence is set by the channel width. Fully-developed active turbulence occurs only when the channel width is larger than the intrinsic, active length scale of the bulk fluid. The results clarify why the activity number is a control parameter for the flow transitions. This journal is

Micro-swimmers in confinement are encountered in a variety of scenarios such as locomotion of sperm cells in female reproductive tract, targeted drug delivery and biofilm formation. Using a squirmer, a surface actuating model, we simulate the trajectory of swimmers in a two-dimensional channel confinement. Exploiting the simplicity of squirmer model and performing the study in two dimensions we restrict the analysis to minimum number of parameters and isolate and analyze the confinement induced swimmer trajectories. Using exact solutions of two dimensional disk squirmers we first show that they behave qualitatively similar to three dimensional spherical squirmers near a repulsive, planar wall. In a channel, fully resolved flow and thus hydrodynamic interaction between the squirmer and the channel walls are obtained using the lattice Boltzmann method. We find that strong pullers and pushers slide along the channel walls, a behavior determined by single wall. In contrast, swimmers with weak force dipoles break the symmetry in behavior between pushers and pullers, and this behavior is determined by both walls of the channel. Weak pullers stay at the channel center and weak pushers execute an oscillatory trajectory spanning the channel width. Straight line trajectories can be solely characterized by a fixed point on a phase plane spanned by its orientation angle and the distance from the channel centerline whereas oscillatory trajectories can be solely characterized using its escape angle from the wall. The nature of the trajectories is found to be robust to the details of higher modes and the size of the confinement.

The spreading of a liquid on another is often encountered in oil spills and coatings and is also of industrial relevance in pharmaceuticals and petrochemicals. In this study, the spreading of oil drops on aqueous solutions containing cationic, anionic, and nonionic surfactants over a wide range of surfactant concentrations is investigated. The spreading behavior quantified by measuring the time evolution of the projected area of the oil lens reveals the occurrence of a maximum, which is strongly dependent on the concentration of the surfactant in the aqueous solution. Our experiments show that this dependence is different at concentrations above and below the critical micelle concentration (CMC) of the surfactant and can be captured by two straight lines of different slopes. Interestingly, these two straight lines intersect at a concentration that coincides with the CMC of the surfactants in solution. We find that this behavior is universal as shown by performing experiments with different types of surfactants, their purity, and other system variables. Thus, we propose a method to unambiguously determine the CMC of surfactant solutions compared to the conventional techniques. The proposed method is simple, versatile, and applicable for the determination of CMC of both ionic and nonionic surfactants.

Recent experiments on active materials, such as dense bacterial suspensions and microtubule-kinesin motor mixtures, show a promising potential for achieving self-sustained flows. However, to develop active microfluidics it is necessary to understand the behaviour of active systems confined to channels. Therefore here we use continuum simulations to investigate the behaviour of active fluids in a two-dimensional channel. Motivated by the fact that most experimental systems show no ordering in the absence of activity, we concentrate on temperatures where there is no nematic order in the passive system, so that any nematic order is induced by the active flow. We systematically analyze the results, identify several different stable flow states, provide a phase diagram and show that the key parameters controlling the flow are the ratio of channel width to the length scale of active flow vortices, and whether the system is flow aligning or flow tumbling.

We use active nematohydrodynamics to study the flow of an active fluid in a 3D microchannel, finding a transition between active turbulence and regimes where there is a net flow along the channel. We show that the net flow is only possible if the active nematic is flow aligning and that, in agreement with experiments, the appearance of the net flow depends on the aspect ratio of the channel cross section. We explain our results in terms of when the hydrodynamic screening due to the channel walls allows the emergence of vortex rolls across the channel.