Functional liquid droplets for analyte sensing and energy harvesting.

Adv Colloid Interface Sci

Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam 781039, India; Centre for Nanotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam 781039, India. Electronic address:

Published: August 2021

Over the past century, rapid miniaturization of technologies has helped in the development of efficient, flexible, portable, robust, and compact applications with minimal wastage of materials. In this direction, of late, the usage of mesoscale liquid droplets has emerged as an alternative platform because of the following advantages: (i) a droplet is incompressible and at the same time deformable, (ii) interfacial area of a spherical droplet is minimum for a given amount of mass; and (iii) a droplet interface allows facile mass, momentum, and energy transfer. Subsequently, such attributes have aided towards the design of diverse droplet-based microfluidic technologies. For example, the microdroplets have been utilized as micro-reactors, colorimetric or electrochemical (EC) sensors, drug-delivery vehicles, and energy harvesters. Further, a number of recently reported lab-on-a-chip technologies exploit the motility, storage, and mixing capacities of the microdroplets. In view of this background, the review initiates discussion by highlighting the different attributes of the microdroplets such as size, shape, surface to volume ratio, wettability, and contact line. Thereafter, the effects of the surface or body forces on the properties of the droplets have been elaborated. Finally, the different aspects of such liquid droplet systems towards technological adaptations in health care, sensing, and energy harvesting have been presented. The review concludes with a tight summary on the potential avenues for further developments.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cis.2021.102453DOI Listing

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