title: Morphological Transformation of Surface Femtodroplets upon Dissolution.
abstract: Constructing controllable liquid patterns with high resolution and accuracy is of great importance in droplet depositions for a range of applications. Simple surface chemical micropatterns have been popularly used to regulate the shape of liquid droplets and the final structure of deposited materials. In this work, we study the morphological evolution of a dissolving femtoliter droplet pinned on multiple microdomains. On the basis of minimization of interfacial energy, the numerical simulations predict various symmetric droplet profiles in equilibrium at different liquid volumes. However, our experimental results show both symmetric and asymmetric shapes of droplets due to contact line pinning and symmetry breaking during droplet dissolution. Upon slow volume reduction, the deposited microdroplet arrays on one single type of simple surface prepatterns spontaneously morphed into a series of complex regular 3D shapes. The findings in this work offer insights into design and prepararion of the rich and complex morphology of liquid patterns via simple surface premicropatterns.
authors.affiliation: Soft Matter & Interfaces Group, School of Engineering, RMIT University , Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia.
authors.forename: Shuhua
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics at Interfaces, Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research , Ackermannweg 10, 55128, Mainz, Germany.
authors.forename: Bat-El
authors.initials: BE
authors.lastname: Pinchasik
authors.affiliation: Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering, RMIT University , Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia.
authors.forename: Hao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Hao
authors.affiliation: Emeritus Group of Interfaces, Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces , Golm/Potsdam D14476, Germany.
authors.forename: Helmuth
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Möhwald
authors.affiliation: Soft Matter & Interfaces Group, School of Engineering, RMIT University , Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia.|Physics of Fluids Group, Department of Science and Engineering, Mesa+ Institute, and J. M. Burgers Centre for Fluid Dynamics, University of Twente , P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Xuehua
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6093-5324
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang