Mask-Enabled Topography Contrast on Aluminum Surfaces.

Patterned solid surfaces with wettability contrast can enhance liquid transport for applications such as electronics thermal management, self-cleaning, and anti-icing. However, prior work has not explored easy and scalable blade-cut masking to impart topography patterned wettability contrast on aluminum (Al), even though Al surfaces are widely used for thermal applications. Here, we demonstrate mask-enabled topography contrast patterning and quantify the resulting accuracy of the topographic pattern resolution, spatial variations in surface roughness, wettability, drop size distribution during dropwise condensation, and thermal emissivity of patterned Al surfaces.

Using a New Pt(II) Source to Make Pt(II) Lantern-Shaped Cages, Including Low-Symmetry, Heteroleptic, and Multicavity Examples.

Current synthetic methods towards Pt(II) lantern-shaped cages involve the use of dry solvent, inert atmosphere, lengthy reaction times, and highly variable yields if isolated. Starting materials such as [Pt(CHCN)](BF) suffer from a poor shelf-life, reducing the synthetic accessibility of various Pt(II) architectures. A new Pt(II) source (with varied counterions), [Pt(3-ClPy)](X) (3-ClPy=3-chloropyridine, X=BF , OTf, NO ), is developed and characterised, showing greatly enhanced shelf-life characteristics under ambient atmospheric conditions.

Attaining Tailored Wicking Behavior with Additive Manufacturing.

Additive manufacturing (AM) has opened a new pathway to create customized wicking materials. With lower manufacturing costs and a larger design space than many alternatives for wicking, AM is of particular value in fields such as thermal management and microfluidics. Fluid propagation during wicking in porous media, however, has largely remained limited to Washburnian () behavior, and optimizing these materials for wicking in a variety of use cases presents a challenge.