A Water Balloon as an Innovative Energy Storage Medium.

Soft rubbery materials are capable of withstanding large deformation, and stretched rubber contracts when heated. Additionally, rubber balloons exhibit non-monotonic pressure-volume curves. These unique properties have inspired numerous ingenious inventions based on rubber balloons. To the authors' knowledge, however, it is surprising that these properties have not inspired any study that exploits the elasticity of rubber balloons for energy storage. Motivated by these, this study examines the performance of water balloons as energy storage media. In each experiment, a single water balloon is implemented using a flat membrane, and it is subject to repeated inflation, heating, deflation, and cooling. Inflating the balloon deposits energy into it. The heating simulates the recycling of waste heat. The balloon delivers work during its deflation. Finally, the cooling completes the energy-storage cycle. The performance is evaluated in terms of the balloon's transferred energies, efficiencies, and service life. Simple as it is, a water balloon is actually an impressively efficient energy storage medium. The efficiency is 85-90% when a water balloon stores and releases energy at room temperature. Recycling waste heat can boost a balloon's efficiency beyond 100%, provided that the cost of the heat is negligible so that the heat is not taken as part of the input energy. However, heating shortens the service life of a balloon and reduces the total energy it can accommodate. By running fatigue tests on balloons, this study reveals the trade-off between a water balloon's efficiency and its longevity. These results shall serve as a useful guide for implementing balloon-based mechanical devices not limited to energy-storage applications.

Droplet motions fill a periodic table.

Drawing parallels to the symmetry breaking of atomic orbitals used to explain the periodic table of chemical elements; here we introduce a periodic table of droplet motions, also based on symmetry breaking but guided by a recent droplet spectral theory. By this theory, higher droplet mode shapes are discovered and a wettability spectrometer is invented. Motions of a partially wetting liquid on a support have natural mode shapes, motions ordered by kinetic energy into the periodic table, each table characteristic of the spherical-cap drop volume and material parameters. For water on a support having a contact angle of about 60°, the first 35 predicted elements of the periodic table are discovered. Periodic tables are related one to another through symmetry breaking into a two-parameter family tree.

Footprint geometry and sessile drop resonance.

In this work, we examine experimentally the resonance of a sessile drop with a square footprint (square drop) on a flat plate. Two families of modal behaviors are reported. One family is identified with the modes of sessile drops with circular footprints (circular drop), denoted as "spherical modes." The other family is associated with Faraday waves on a square liquid bath (square Faraday waves), denoted as "grid modes." The two families are distinguished based on their dispersion behaviors. By comparing the occurrence of the modes, we recognize spherical modes as the characteristic of sessile drops, and grid modes as the constrained response. Within a broader context, we further discuss the resonance modes of circular sessile drops and free spherical drops, and we recognize various modal behaviors as surface waves under different extents of constraint. From these, we conclude that sessile drops resonate according to how wave-number selection by footprint geometry and capillarity compete. For square drops, a dominant effect of footprint constraint leads to grid modes; otherwise, the drops exhibit spherical modes, the characteristic of sessile drops on flat plates.

Mass production of shaped particles through vortex ring freezing.

A vortex ring is a torus-shaped fluidic vortex. During its formation, the fluid experiences a rich variety of intriguing geometrical intermediates from spherical to toroidal. Here we show that these constantly changing intermediates can be 'frozen' at controlled time points into particles with various unusual and unprecedented shapes. These novel vortex ring-derived particles, are mass-produced by employing a simple and inexpensive electrospraying technique, with their sizes well controlled from hundreds of microns to millimetres. Guided further by theoretical analyses and a laminar multiphase fluid flow simulation, we show that this freezing approach is applicable to a broad range of materials from organic polysaccharides to inorganic nanoparticles. We demonstrate the unique advantages of these vortex ring-derived particles in several applications including cell encapsulation, three-dimensional cell culture, and cell-free protein production. Moreover, compartmentalization and ordered-structures composed of these novel particles are all achieved, creating opportunities to engineer more sophisticated hierarchical materials.

Substrate constraint modifies the Rayleigh spectrum of vibrating sessile drops.

In this work, we study the resonance behavior of mechanically oscillated, sessile water drops. By mechanically oscillating sessile drops vertically and within prescribed ranges of frequencies and amplitudes, a rich collection of resonance modes are observed and their dynamics subsequently investigated. We first present our method of identifying each mode uniquely, through association with spherical harmonics and according to their geometric patterns. Next, we compare our measured resonance frequencies of drops to theoretical predictions using both the classical theory of Lord Rayleigh and Lamb for free, oscillating drops, and a prediction by Bostwick and Steen that explicitly considers the effect of the solid substrate on drop dynamics. Finally, we report observations and analysis of drop mode mixing, or the simultaneous coexistence of multiple mode shapes within the resonating sessile drop driven by one sinusoidal signal of a single frequency. The dynamic response of a deformable liquid drop constrained by the substrate it is in contact with is of interest in a number of applications, such as drop atomization and ink jet printing, switchable electronically controlled capillary adhesion, optical microlens devices, as well as digital microfluidic applications where control of droplet motion is induced by means of a harmonically driven substrate.