The creation of free-standing lipid membranes has been so far of remarkable interest to investigate processes occurring in the cell membrane since its unsupported part enables studies in which it is important to maintain cell-like physicochemical properties of the lipid bilayer, that nonetheless depend on its molecular composition. In this study, we prepare pore-spanning membranes that mimic the composition of plasma membranes and perform force spectroscopy indentation measurements to unravel mechanistic insights depending on lipid composition. We show that this approach is highly effective for studying the mechanical properties of such membranes. Furthermore, we identify a direct influence of cholesterol and sphingomyelin on the elasticity of the bilayer and adhesion between the two leaflets. Eventually, we explore the possibilities of imaging in the unsupported membrane regions. For this purpose, we investigate the adsorption and movement of a peripheral protein, the fibroblast growth factor 2, on the complex membrane.

Directional wicking and spreading of liquids can be achieved by regular micro-patterns of specifically designed topographic features that break the reflection symmetry of the underlying pattern. The present study aims to understand the formation and stability of wetting films during the evaporation of volatile liquid drops on surfaces with a micro-pattern of triangular posts arranged in a rectangular lattice. Depending on the density and aspect ratio of the posts, we observe either spherical-cap shaped drops with a mobile three-phase contact line or the formation of circular or angular drops with a pinned three-phase contact line. Drops of the latter class eventually evolve into a liquid film extending to the initial footprint of the drop and a shrinking cap-shaped drop sitting on the film. The drop evolution is controlled by the density and aspect ratio of the posts, while no influence of the orientation of the triangular posts on the contact line mobility becomes evident. Our experiments corroborate previous results of systematic numerical energy minimization, predicting that conditions for a spontaneous retraction of a wicking liquid film depend weakly on the orientation of the film edge relative to the micro-pattern.

In many situations, patterns of immiscible fluid displacement appear obviously different at first glance, but can hardly be distinguished using the commonly applied quantification by fractal dimension. In this work, we propose the mean finger area of the invading fluid, the average distance of defending fluid elements to the invading fluid as well as a discrete surface area of a coarse grained fluid representation as three alternative methods to characterize fluid displacement patterns in three dimensional permeable media. Applying the proposed methods to X-ray microtomography data of fluid displacement experiments in bead packs of homogeneous and mixed wettability, all of the three methods allow to clearly distinguish between a compact front morphology for wetting invading liquids and a finger-like structure for non-wetting invading liquids. When compared to the fractal dimension of the fluid pattern, all three quantities reveal more details with respect to the structure of the invading liquid. Applying these methods to microtomography data of fluid displacement in heterogeneously wetting bead packs reveal a fingering structure and preferential invasion paths that are controlled by local wettability.

A detailed study on similarities and differences of monodisperse dry and wet dense granular flow down on rough and smooth inclined planes was carried out by discrete element method simulations. Despite implementing a minimal model for capillary bridge cohesive force, all leading regimes of a granular flow, i.e.  low-dissipation, high-dissipation, and oscillatory flow, can be developed in wet granular flow, similar to what we knew in the dry one. A smooth and rough based inclined planes as well as different inclination angels were used as parameters to create various flow regimes in dry and wet granular flow. In the oscillatory flow regime, the frequency of velocity profile variation is lower than that of the dry one. The velocity profile of the wet system in the low-dissipation flow regime exhibits an abrupt slope change at shear band bottom. As a measure of particle velocity fluctuations we have studied granular temperature in layers parallel to the inclined base. We found the temperature profile is increasing from the top to bottom, which means the shear band can be considered as a frozen region. By calculation of Radial Distribution Function (RDF) and using the adaptive Common Neighbor Analysis (a-CNA), the evolution of ordered/disordered structures in both dry and wet models is studied. In a wet system in the low-dissipation regime, the shear band exhibits frozen polycrystalline structure and in the bottom slice, in spite of having layered flow in the scale of one granule, we have a low fraction of crystallization. This study gives insightful key differences between wet and dry monodisperese granular flows, specifically the appearance of ordering and presence of crystalizations in different parts of high and low dissipation flow.

Droplets made of a water/ethanol mixture spontaneously self-propel in an oil/surfactant solution and, depending on the initial ethanol concentration at the time of production, may evolve in up to three stages. Upon self-propulsion the droplets absorb surfactant molecules during their continuous motion in the oily phase. In combination with the continuous loss of ethanol this mass exchange with the ambient phase may lead to a spontaneous phase separation of the water/ethanol mixture, and eventually to the formation of characteristic Janus droplets. Supported by experimental evidence, we propose a simple model that is able to explain the propulsion velocity and its scaling with the droplet radius in the last stage of the droplet evolution.

Liquid invasion into a porous medium is a phenomenon of great importance in both nature and technology. Despite its enormous importance, there is a surprisingly sparse understanding of the processes occurring on the scale of individual pores and of how these processes determine the global invasion pattern. In particular, the exact influence of the wettability remains unclear besides the limiting cases of very small or very large contact angles of the invading fluid. Most quantitative pore-scale experiments and theoretical considerations have been conducted in effectively two-dimensional (2D) micromodels and Hele–Shaw geometries. Although these pioneering works helped to unravel some of the physical aspects of the displacement processes, the relevance of 2D models has not always been appreciated for natural porous media. With the availability of X-ray microtomography, 3D imaging has become a standard for exploring pore-scale processes in porous media. Applying advanced postprocessing routines and synchrotron microtomography, researchers can image even slow flow processes in real time and extract relevant material parameters like the contact angle from the interfaces in the pore space. These advances are expected to boost both theoretical and experimental understanding of pore-scale processes in natural porous media.

Multiphase flows in porous media are important in many natural and industrial processes. Pore-scale models for multiphase flows have seen rapid development in recent years and are becoming increasingly useful as predictive tools in both academic and industrial applications. However, quantitative comparisons between different pore-scale models, and between these models and experimental data, are lacking. Here, we perform an objective comparison of a variety of state-of-the-art pore-scale models, including lattice Boltzmann, stochastic rotation dynamics, volume-of-fluid, level-set, phase-field, and pore-network models. As the basis for this comparison, we use a dataset from recent microfluidic experiments with precisely controlled pore geometry and wettability conditions, which offers an unprecedented benchmarking opportunity. We compare the results of the 14 participating teams both qualitatively and quantitatively using several standard metrics, such as fractal dimension, finger width, and displacement efficiency. We find that no single method excels across all conditions and that thin films and corner flow present substantial modeling and computational challenges.

Wicking of wetting liquids into micropatterns of posts with homogeneous triangular cross section is studied in experiments and by numerical energy minimizations. To test for directional wicking, we fabricated regular arrays of posts with various combinations of line fractions and aspect ratios using standard photolithography processes. In agreement with numerical energy minimizations of the liquid film morphology, we find spontaneous wicking in the experiments only for line fractions and aspect ratios where the homogeneous liquid film represents the state of lowest interfacial free energy and where no local energy minimum could be detected in our numerical energy minimizations. The numerical results further demonstrate that the stability of a certain morphology of the terminal meniscus controls the direction of wicking relative to the orientation of the triangular posts. The observed selectivity of spontaneous wicking with respect to the meniscus orientation can be exploited to build a microfluidic rectifier for partially wetting liquids.

Anisotropic spreading of liquids and elongated droplet shapes are often encountered on surfaces decorated with a periodic micropattern of linear surface topographies. Numerical calculations and wetting experiments show that the shape evolution of droplets that are slowly growing on a surface with parallel grooves can be grouped into two distinct morphological regimes. In the first regime, the liquid of the growing droplet spreads only into the direction parallel to the grooves. In the second regime, the three-phase contact line advances also perpendicular to the grooves, whereas the growing droplets approach a scale-invariant shape. Here, we demonstrate that shapes of droplets in contact with a large number of linear grooves are identical to the shapes of droplets confined to a plane chemical stripe, where this mapping of shapes is solely based on the knowledge of the cross section of the linear grooves and the material contact angle. The spectrum of interfacial shapes on the chemical stripe can be exploited to predict the particular growth mode and the asymptotic value of the base eccentricity in the limit of droplets covering a large number of grooves. The proposed model shows an excellent agreement with experimentally observed base eccentricities for droplets on grooves of various cross sections. The universality of the model is underlined by the accurate match with available literature data for droplet eccentricities on parallel chemical stripes.

Energy dissipation in sheared dry and wet granulates is considered in the presence of an externally applied confining pressure. Discrete element simulations reveal that for sufficiently small confining pressures, the energy dissipation is dominated by the effects related to the presence of cohesive forces between the particles. The residual resistance against shear can be quantitatively explained by a combination of two effects arising in a wet granulate: (i) enhanced friction at particle contacts in the presence of attractive capillary forces and (ii) energy dissipation due to the rupture and reformation of liquid bridges. Coulomb friction at grain contacts gives rise to an energy dissipation which grows linearly with increasing confining pressure for both dry and wet granulates. Because of a lower Coulomb friction coefficient in the case of wet grains, as the confining pressure increases the energy dissipation for dry systems is faster than for wet ones.

We report the results of comprehensive experiments and numerical calculations of interfacial morphologies of water confined to the hydrophilic top face of rectangular posts subjected to vertical vibrations. In response to mechanical driving, an initially flat liquid channel is collected into a liquid bulge that forms in the center of the rectangular post if the acceleration exceeds a certain threshold. The bulge morphology persists after the driving is switched off, in agreement with the morphological bistability of static interfacial shapes on posts with large length-to-width ratios. In a narrow frequency band, the channel does not decay into a bulge at any acceleration amplitude, but displays irregular capillary waves and sloshing instead. On short posts, however, a liquid bulge can be dynamically sustained through vertical vibrations but quickly decays into a homogeneous channel after the external driving is stopped. To explain the dynamic bulging of the liquid interface, we propose an effective lifting force pulling on the drop's slowly moving center of mass in the presence of fast oscillation modes.

Self-propelled droplets capable of transporting cargo to specific target locations are desired tools for many future applications. Here we propose a class of active droplets with programmable delivery time that are attracted or repelled by certain obstacle geometries. These droplets consist of a water/ethanol mixture and are dispersed in an oil/surfactant solution. Owing to a mass exchange between fluid phases during self-propulsion, the initially homogeneous droplets spontaneously de-mix and evolve into characteristic Janus droplets. Cargo molecules, like DNA, can be separated into the trailing ethanol-rich droplet and are carried to their target location "like in a backpack". The delayed onset of phase separation provides a handle to control the time frame of delivery, while long-ranged hydrodynamic interactions and short-ranged wetting forces are exploited to achieve the desired spatial specificity with respect to obstacle geometry and surface chemistry.

Wettability is an important factor which controls the displacement of immiscible fluids in permeable media, with far reaching implications for storage of CO2 in deep saline aquifers, fuel cells, oil recovery, and for the remediation of oil contaminated soils. Considering the paradigmatic case of random piles of spherical beads, fluid front morphologies emerging during slow immiscible displacement are investigated in real time by X-ray micro–tomography and quantitatively compared with model predictions. Controlled by the wettability of the bead matrix two distinct displacement patterns are found. A compact front morphology emerges if the invading fluid wets the beads while a fingered morphology is found for non–wetting invading fluids, causing the residual amount of defending fluid to differ by one order of magnitude. The corresponding crossover between these two regimes in terms of the advancing contact angle is governed by an interplay of wettability and pore geometry and can be predicted on the basis of a purely quasi–static consideration of local instabilities that control the progression of the invading interface.

We investigate the dewetting of a droplet on a smooth horizontal solid surface for different slip lengths and equilibrium contact angles. Specifically, we solve for the axisymmetric Stokes flow using the boundary element method with (i) the Navier-slip boundary condition at the solid/liquid boundary and (ii) a time-independent equilibrium contact angle at the contact line. When decreasing the rescaled slip length $\tilde{b}$ with respect to the initial central height of the droplet, the typical non-sphericity of a droplet first increases, reaches a maximum at a characteristic rescaled slip length $\tilde{b}_{m}\approx O(0.1{-}1)$ and then decreases. Regarding different equilibrium contact angles, two universal rescalings are proposed to describe the behaviour of the non-sphericity for rescaled slip lengths larger or smaller than $\tilde{b}_{m}$. Around $\tilde{b}_{m}$, the early time evolution of the profiles at the rim can be described by similarity solutions. The results are explained in terms of the structure of the flow field governed by different dissipation channels: elongational flows for $\tilde{b}\gg \tilde{b}_{m}$, friction at the substrate for $\tilde{b}\approx \tilde{b}_{m}$ and shear flows for $\tilde{b}\ll \tilde{b}_{m}$. Following the changes between these dominant dissipation mechanisms, our study indicates a crossover to the quasistatic regime when $\tilde{b}$ is many orders of magnitude smaller than $\tilde{b}_{m}$.

The confined flow of cancer cells, viscous droplets, and deformable, elastic particles in microchannels at millisecond deformation timescales show that the passage time and friction force depend on cell, droplet, and particle size and viscosity of the emulsion droplets, but not on the elastic modulus of particles, contrary to prior claims. Force balance reveals a viscosity-dependent lubrication film thickness larger than 100 nm in the majority of cases, indicating that hydrodynamic friction and not surface friction dominates cell and deformable particle transport. Our results suggest that—in the hydrodynamic friction regime—cancer cell transport through microchannels is similar to that of drops. Given that prior works report passage times and cell velocities that vary by five orders of magnitude, we emphasize the need to comprehensively understand the relationship between cell confinement, velocity, friction force, lubrication film thickness, and rheology to interpret tumor cell passage time data and connect it to cancer cell invasiveness. PAPER 2017

Multi-color Stochastic Rotation Dynamics (SRDmc) has been introduced by Inoue et al. as a particle based simulation method to study the flow of emulsion droplets in non-wetting microchannels. In this work, we extend the multi-color method to also account for different wetting conditions. This is achieved by assigning the color information not only to fluid particles but also to virtual wall particles that are required to enforce proper no-slip boundary conditions. To extend the scope of the original SRDmc algorithm to e.g. immiscible two-phase flow with viscosity contrast we implement an angular momentum conserving scheme (SRDmc+). We perform extensive benchmark simulations to show that a mono-phase SRDmc fluid exhibits bulk properties identical to a standard SRD fluid and that SRDmc fluids are applicable to a wide range of immiscible two-phase flows. To quantify the adhesion of a SRDmc+ fluid in contact to the walls we measure the apparent contact angle from sessile droplets in mechanical equilibrium. For a further verification of our wettability implementation we compare the dewetting of a liquid film from a wetting stripe to experimental and numerical studies of interfacial morphologies on chemically structured surfaces.

We present systematic wetting experiments and numerical simulations of gravity driven liquid drops sliding on a plane substrate decorated with a linear chemical step. Surprisingly, the optimal direction to observe crossing is not the one perpendicular to the step, but a finite angle that depends on the material parameters. We computed the landscapes of the force acting on the drop by means of a contact line mobility model showing that contact angle hysteresis dominates the dynamics at the step and determines whether the drop passes onto the lower substrate. This analysis is very well supported by the experimental dynamic phase diagram in terms of pinning, crossing, sliding and sliding followed by pinning.