Professor Anderson H.C. Shum of Department of Mechanical Engineering and his team had worked on the research for the topic “Generation of Fermat’s spiral patterns by solutal Marangoni-driven coiling in an aqueous two-phase system”. The research was recently published by Nature Communications on November 23, 2022.
Details of the publication:
Generation of Fermat’s spiral patterns by solutal Marangoni-driven coiling in an aqueous two-phase system
Yang Xiao, Neil M. Ribe, Yage Zhang, Yi Pan, Yang Cao & Ho Cheung Shum, Article in
Nature Communications, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34368-5
Abstract:
The solutal Marangoni effect is attracting increasing interest because of its fundamental role in many isothermal directional transport processes in fluids, including the Marangoni-driven spreading on liquid surfaces or Marangoni convection within a liquid. Here we report a type of continuous Marangoni transport process resulting from Marangoni-driven spreading and Marangoni convection in an aqueous two-phase system. The interaction between a salt (CaCl2) and an anionic surfactant (sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate) generates surface tension gradients, which drive the transport process. This Marangoni transport consists of the upward transfer of a filament from a droplet located at the bottom of a bulk solution, coiling of the filament near the surface, and formation of Fermat’s spiral patterns on the surface. The bottom-up coiling of the filament, driven by Marangoni convection, may inspire automatic fiber fabrication.