Engineering Disorder in Droplet Packings through Polydispersity and Adhesion

Area of Science:

• Soft Matter Physics
• Microfluidics
• Materials Science

Background:

• Disorder can be a tunable property for biomimetic design and material innovation.
• Adapting controlled disorder principles from 2D materials to 2D microdroplet packings presents new opportunities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a microfluidic platform for controlling disorder in droplet-based soft matter systems.
• To investigate controlled disorder as a design parameter in 2D microdroplet packings.

Main Methods:

• Developed a microfluidic platform integrating droplet generation, transfer, and imaging.
• Optimized transfer channel height and employed air interface sweeping for reproducible 2D droplet packing.
• Modulated droplet adhesion and polydispersity to engineer controlled disorder.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated compact and reproducible 2D droplet packing using microfluidic engineering strategies.
• Quantified structural disorder using bond orientational order parameters and excess entropy.
• Validated that increased polydispersity and droplet adhesion lead to higher structural disorder.

Conclusions:

• The microfluidic platform successfully engineers controlled disorder in 2D droplet packings.
• This platform enables exploration of controlled disorder in patterned materials and biomimetic models.
• The findings open avenues for material innovation by harnessing disorder as a tunable property.