Visible light guided manipulation of liquid wettability on photoresponsive surfaces
Name
Visible light guided.pdf
Size
928.62 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
8f4d2aed4c73538b4d4af7a809e62be4
Author(s)
Gondal, Mohammed A.
Kwon, Gibum
Panchanathan, Divya
Mahmoudi, Seyed Reza
McKinley, Gareth H
Varanasi, Kripa
Date Issued
April 2017
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Kwon, Gibum; Panchanathan, Divya; Mahmoudi, Seyed Reza; Gondal, Mohammed A.; McKinley, Gareth H. and Varanasi, Kripa K. “Visible Light Guided Manipulation of Liquid Wettability on Photoresponsive Surfaces.” Nature Communications 8 (April 2017): 14968 © 2017 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Photoresponsive titania surfaces are of great interest due to their unique wettability change upon ultraviolet light illumination. However, their applications are often limited either by the inability to respond to visible light or the need for special treatment to recover the original wettability. Sensitizing TiO₂ surfaces with visible light-absorbing materials has been utilized in photovoltaic applications. Here we demonstrate that a dye-sensitized TiO₂ surface can selectively change the wettability towards contacting liquids upon visible light illumination due to a photo-induced voltage across the liquid and the underlying surface. The photo-induced wettability change of our surfaces enables external manipulation of liquid droplet motion upon illumination. We show demulsification of surfactant-stabilized brine-in-oil emulsions via coalescence of brine droplets on our dye-sensitized TiO₂ surface upon visible light illumination. We anticipate that our surfaces will have a wide range of applications including microfluidic devices with customizable wettability, solar-driven oil–water clean-up and demulsification technologies.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14968
