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Microscopic active droplets are able to swim autonomously in viscous flows: this puzzling feature stems from solute exchanges with the surrounding fluid via surface reactions or their spontaneous solubilisation, and the interfacial flows resulting from these solutes' gradients. Contrary to asymmetric active colloids, these isotropic droplets swim spontaneously by exploiting the nonlinear coupling of solute transport with self-generated Marangoni flows, which is also responsible for secondary transitions to more complex individual and collective dynamics. Thanks to their simple design and their sensitivity to physico-chemical signals, they are fascinating physicists, chemists, biologists and fluid dynamicists alike to analyse viscous self-propulsion and collective dynamics in active matter systems, to develop synthetic cellular models or to perform targeted biomedical or engineering applications. I review here the most recent and significant developments of this rapidly-growing field, focusing on the mathematical and physical modelling of these intringuing droplets, together with its experimental design and characterisation., Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures, to appear in Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics

International audience; Liquid marbles, that is, liquid drops coated by a hydrophobic powder, do not wet any solid or liquid substrate, making their transport and manipulation both highly desirable and challenging. Herein, we describe the light driven transport of floating liquid marbles and emphasize a surprising motion behavior. Liquid marbles are deposited on a water solution containing photosensitive surfactants. Irradiation of the solution generates photoreversible Marangoni flows that transport the liquid marbles toward UV light and away from blue light when the thickness of the liquid substrate is large enough (Marangoni regime). Below a critical thickness, the liquid marbles move in the opposite direction to that of the surface flow at a speed increasing with decreasing liquid thickness (anti Marangoni). We demonstrate that the anti Marangoni motion is driven by the free surface deformation, which propels the non-wetting marble against the surface flow. We call this behavior "slide effect".

The objective of this work is to generate irregular, smooth, adaptive laser scan trajectories for pulsed laser polishing. Traditionally pulsed laser polishing, like other surface finishing processes has used zig-zag scan paths. Zig-zag trajectories are simple in nature, are comprised of sharp turns, the dynamics of the positioning system are not considered, and more importantly are not adaptable because the path generation is independent of surface condition. In this paper, the authors present an intelligent scan trajectory generation scheme that can overcome these limitations. These trajectories are based on the artificial potential fields method of path planning that take the surface condition into account. Computer simulations are presented to illustrate the characteristics of the path and guidelines are developed for choosing the trajectory generation parameters. Experiments show that these trajectories result in marginal improvements in the average surface roughness when compared to the traditional zig-zag trajectories, all the while overcoming the limitations. Finally, smooth, irregular scan trajectories are generated for a micro end milled Ti6Al4V surface with a feature that needs no polishing, thus illustrating the versatility of the trajectory generations scheme., by Madhu Vadali, Chao Ma, Xiaochun Li, Frank E. Pfefferkorn and Neil A. Duffie

Despite its fundamental and practical relevance, flow structure and evolution within volatile mixture drops remains largely unexplored. We study experimentally, using particle image velocimetry (PIV), the evolution of internal flow during the evaporation of ethanol–water mixture drops for different initial concentrations. The investigation revealed the existence of three stages in the evolving flow behaviour within these binary volatile drops. We propose an analysis of the nature of the flow and focus on understanding successive flow stages as well as transition from multiple vortices to a monotonic outward flow. We show that the existence of multiple vortices during the first stage is driven by local concentration gradients along the interface. When the more volatile component (in this case ethanol) is depleted, the intensity of this Marangoni flow abruptly declines. Towards the end of the first stage, ethanol is driven from the bulk of the drop to the interface to sustain weakening concentration gradients. Once these gradients are too weak, the solutal Marangoni number becomes sub-critical and the driving force for the flow switches off. The evolution of flow structure and transition between stages is found to be well correlated with the ratio of Marangoni and Reynolds numbers. Furthermore, we argue that whilst the observed vortices are driven by surface tension shear stress originating at the liquid/vapour interface, the transition in flow and its dynamics is entirely determined by viscous dissipation. The comparison between the analytical expression for vorticity decay based on viscous dissipation and the experimental data shows a very good agreement. The analysis also shows that regardless of the initial concentration, for same sized drops, the transition in flow follows exactly the same trend. This further supports the hypothesis of a viscous dissipation transition of the flow. The last stage is satisfactorily explained based on non-uniform evaporation and continuity-driven flow.