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Related Concept Videos

Reflection of Waves01:07

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When a wave travels from one medium to another, it gets reflected at the boundary of the second medium. A common example of this is when a person yells at a distance from a cliff and hears the echo of their voice. The sound waves (longitudinal waves) traveling in the air are reflected from the bounding cliff. Similarly, flipping one end of a string whose other end is tied to a wall causes a pulse (transverse wave) to travel through the string, which gets reflected upon reaching the wall. In...
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Nov 24, 2025

High Throughput Analysis of Liquid Droplet Impacts
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High Throughput Analysis of Liquid Droplet Impacts

Published on: March 6, 2020

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Nonspecular Reflection of Droplets.

Pingan Zhu1,2,3, Chengmin Chen4,5, Krishnaswamy Nandakumar6

  • 1Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.

Small (Weinheim an Der Bergstrasse, Germany)
|December 21, 2020
PubMed
Summary

Droplets can now be steered in any direction after bouncing off surfaces with a special dimple. This breakthrough enables precise control over droplet movement for various applications.

Keywords:
droplet impactliquid repellencynonspecular reflection of dropletsomnidirectional droplet transportsymmetry breaking

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Area of Science:

  • Fluid dynamics
  • Surface science
  • Materials science

Background:

  • Droplet bouncing on super-repellent surfaces typically follows the law of reflection.
  • Existing methods lack precise control over droplet trajectories.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate nonspecular reflection of droplets on surfaces with dimples.
  • To demonstrate tunable droplet transport for versatile manipulation.

Main Methods:

  • Experimental study of droplet impingement on surfaces with dimples.
  • Analysis of droplet reflection trajectories based on varying parameters like dimple radius, droplet radius, impact position, and Weber number.

Main Results:

  • Nonspecular reflection and tunable translational velocity of droplets were observed.
  • The direction and magnitude of droplet velocity can be precisely controlled by adjusting geometric and dynamic parameters.

Conclusions:

  • Dimpled surfaces break the symmetries of specular reflection, enabling controlled droplet transport.
  • This technique offers versatile droplet manipulation, including trapping, shedding, antigravity transport, and targeted coalescence.