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]