Stretching liquid bridges with bubbles: the effect of air bubbles on liquid transfer

On the identification of liquid surface properties using liquid bridges

The term liquid bridge refers to the specific silhouette of a liquid volume when it is placed between two solid surfaces. Liquid bridges have been studied extensively both theoretically and experimentally during the last century due to their significance in many technological applications. It is worth noticing that even today new technological applications based on liquid bridges continue to appear. A liquid bridge has a well-defined surface configuration dictated by a rigid theoretical foundation so the potential of its utilization as a tool to study surface properties of liquids is apparent. However, it is very scarce in literature that the use of liquid bridges is suggested as an alternative to the well-established drop techniques (pendant/sessile drop). The present work (i) presents the theoretical background for setting up a liquid-bridge based surface property estimation problem, (ii) describes the required experimental equipment and procedures and (iii) performs a thorough literature review on the subject. A case with particular interest is that of liquid bridges made of electrically conducting liquids forming between two conducting solids; such a liquid bridge presents an integral electrical conductance value which is sensitive to the specific silhouette of the bridge. This enables the use of this integral conductance as shape descriptor instead of the conventional image processing techniques. Several attempts in literature for the estimation of liquid surface tension, liquid-solid contact angle and surfactant induced surface elasticity for conducting or non/conducting liquids are presented and the prospects of the technique are discussed.

Cell filling in gravure printing for printed electronics

Highly scaled direct gravure is a promising printing technique for printed electronics due to its large throughput, high resolution, and simplicity. Gravure can print features in the single micron range at printing speeds of ∼1 m/s by using an optimized cell geometry and optimized printing conditions. The filling of the cells on the gravure cylinder is a critical process, since the amount of ink in the cells strongly impacts printed feature size and quality. Therefore, an understanding of cell filling is crucial to make highly scaled gravure printed electronics viable. In this work we report a novel experimental setup to investigate the filling process in real time, coupled with numerical simulations to gain insight into the experimental observations. By varying viscosity and filling speed, we ensure that the dimensionless capillary number is a good indicator of filling regime in real gravure printing. In addition, we also examine the effect of cell size on filling as this is important for increasing printing resolution. In the light of experimental and simulation results, we are able to rationalize the dominant failure in the filling process, i.e., air entrapment, which is caused by contact line pinning and interface deformation over the cell opening.

From concave to convex: capillary bridges in slit pore geometry

We investigate the morphological evolution of nonaxisymmetric capillary bridges in slit-pore geometry as the height of the pore and aspect ratio of the bridge are varied. The liquid bridges are formed between two hydrophobic surfaces patterned with hydrophilic strips. The aspect ratio of the capillary bridges (length/width) is varied from 2.5 to 120 by changing the separation between the surfaces, the width of the strips, or the fluid volume. As the bridge height is increased, the aspect ratio decreases and we observe a large increase in the mean curvature of the bridge. More specifically, the following counterintuitive result is observed: the mean curvature of the bridges changes sign and goes from negative (concave bridge) to positive (convex bridge) when the height is increased at constant volume. These experimental observations are in quantitative agreement with Surface Evolver simulations. Scaling shows a collapse of the data indicating that this transition in the sign of the Laplace pressure is universal for capillary bridges with high aspect ratios. Finally, we show that the morphology diagrams obtained from our 3D analysis are considerably different from those expected from a 2D analysis.