Dec 5, 2022
Professor Anderson H.C. Shum of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and his team worked on the research for the topic “Generation of Fermat’s spiral patterns by solutal Marangoni-driven coiling in an aqueous two-phase system”. This work is a collaboration with Professor Neil Ribe from University Paris-Saclay. The research is recently published and featured by Nature Communications on November 23, 2022.
Details of the publication:
“Generation of Fermat’s spiral patterns by solutal Marangoni-driven coiling in an aqueous two-phase system”
Yang Xiao, Neil M. Ribe, Yage Zhang, Yi Pan, Yang Cao & Ho Cheung Shum
Article in Nature Communications, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34368-5
Abstract:
The solutal Marangoni effect is attracting increasing interest because of its fundamental role in many isothermal directional transport processes in fluids, including the Marangoni-driven spreading on liquid surfaces or Marangoni convection within a liquid. Here we report a type of continuous Marangoni transport process resulting from Marangoni-driven spreading and Marangoni convection in an aqueous two-phase system. The interaction between a salt (CaCl2) and an anionic surfactant (sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate) generates surface tension gradients, which drive the transport process. This Marangoni transport consists of the upward transfer of a filament from a droplet located at the bottom of a bulk solution, coiling of the filament near the surface, and formation of Fermat’s spiral patterns on the surface. The bottom-up coiling of the filament, driven by Marangoni convection, may inspire automatic fiber fabrication.
Note: Pictures are reproduced under the terms of the CC-BY license. [Nat. Commun. 2022, 13, 7206]