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Updated: Jun 17, 2025

Fabricating High-viscosity Droplets using Microfluidic Capillary Device with Phase-inversion Co-flow Structure
Published on: April 17, 2018
Inverse Phase Transition in Droplet Clusters Levitating over the Locally Heated Water Layer
Alexander A Fedorets1, Leonid A Dombrovsky1,2,3, Edward Bormashenko3
1X-BIO Institute, University of Tyumen, 6 Volodarskogo St., Tyumen 625003, Russia.
Abstract:
Self-assembled microdroplet clusters can levitate above a locally heated water surface. Normally, the temperature of droplets is in the range of 50-95 °C. However, it is possible to generate clusters at lower temperatures. Here, we study the structure and behavior of such cold-stabilized droplet clusters with variable temperature. It has been established that as the temperature decreases, the role of aerodynamic forces decreases, while electrostatic forces, on the contrary, increase. We studied the behavior of droplet clusters at relatively low temperatures down to 28 °C. A chaotic motion of droplets and a phase transition were observed at the surface temperature of the water below a critical value of about Tmax = 35 ± 2 °C. The orderliness of the cluster was quantified with the Shannon/Voronoi entropy. Several stages of cluster evolution were observed and analyzed, and a mechanism of this phenomenon is discussed. An inverse phase transition in which cooling of the cluster decreases its orderliness is discussed. Frequencies of the droplets' oscillations coincide qualitatively with the frequency of the plasma oscillations within the cluster.
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