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Liquid drop crystals
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Published: 08 August 2022 .
FLUID DYNAMICS
Liquid drop crystals .
Elizaveta Dubrovina 1 ? .
Nature Physics volume ?18 ,? page 854 ( 2022 ) Cite this article
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Fluid dynamics .
Fluids .
Self-assembly .
Soft materials .

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Consider the refreshing jet of water flowing from a toy water pistol on a hot summer’s day. The liquid will come out of the nozzle as a thread but will soon break up into droplets (pictured), which have a smaller surface area and are thus favoured by surface tension. The instability that drives the breakup of a liquid thread has been studied in detail, but most previous work focussed on single threads. Lingzhi Cai and colleagues have now shown that, when a series of threads are extruded parallel to each other, the interactions between the perturbations driving the instability lock the droplets into a lattice ( Sci. Adv . 8 , eabq0828; 2022 ).
Credit: AAAS
The interfacial perturbations can be modelled as waves travelling along the thread with a natural wavelength that depends on the thickness of the liquid thread and dictates the distance between drops. Cai and colleagues fabricated a solid template with a range of periods and showed that it could force the distance between drops to differ from the natural wavelength. This suggested that a template — such as an array of droplets — did indeed influence the breakup of each successive thread and enforced a particular spacing between droplets.
Cai and colleagues proceeded to test this with rows of printed droplets. Not only did the first thread determine the breakup pattern of all following threads, but any defects introduced into the lattice were eventually smoothed out, leading to a uniform crystal. The wavelengths that were closest to the natural one grew fastest leading to a gradual convergence of the droplet pattern to a lattice structure.
The team also explored a system in which two sets of droplets were printed by viscous threads that have different thicknesses. Given that the natural wavelength depends on the thread radius, one would expect different wavelengths in the two sets of droplets. However, they found that a single wavelength is selected by a mechanism similar to the one smoothing out single-thickness thread breakup.
The obtained drop crystals are an elegant use of the jet breakup instability and the presented approach might find applications in controllable and scalable material fabrication.
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Elizaveta Dubrovina
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Dubrovina, E. Liquid drop crystals. Nat. Phys. 18, 854 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01728-3
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Published : 08 August 2022
Issue Date : August 2022
DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01728-3
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