Chasing drops: following escaper and pursuer drop couple system.

We study experimentally six different systems in which Marangoni flow is induced by two chemically different drops on a solid surface in air. In such systems one drop seems to chase away the other. We show that in all the systems studied, the Marangoni flow is induced at the solid-vapor interface as opposed to the air-liquid interface. This is true even for the case of water drop and alcohol drop on a glass surface (which corresponds to the "tears of wine" classical case). Thus we explain the drop motion as a result of an interfacial tension gradient which takes place primarily at the air-surface region and less, if at all, at the two other interfaces in the problem: the liquid-substrate or liquid-air interfaces. Then we follow the motion of drops on surfaces and find that it is discontinuous, i.e. characterized by stops and jumps as in a stick slip mechanism. We explain this behavior by an increase in the Laplace pressure that creates a higher anchoring pinning effect at the front edge of the moving drop. The understanding of this process has implications for passively separating mixed liquids.

Drop retention force as a function of resting time.

The force, f, required to slide a drop on a surface is shown to be a growing function of the time, t, that the drop waited resting on the surface prior to the commencement of sliding. In this first report on the resting time effect, we demonstrate the existence of this phenomenon in different systems, which suggests that this phenomenon is general. We show that d f/d t is never negative. The shorter the resting times, the higher d f/d t is. As the resting time increases, d f/d t decreases toward zero (plateau) as t --> infinity. The increase in the force, Delta f, due to the resting time effect (i.e., f( t --> infinity) - f( t --> 0)) correlates well with the vertical component of the liquid-vapor surface tension, and we attribute this phenomenon to the corrugation of the surface by the drop due to this unsatisfied normal component of Young's equation.

Drop retention force as a function of drop size.

The force, f, required to slide a drop past a surface is often considered in the literature as linear with the drop width, w, so that f/w = const. Furthermore, according to the Dussan equation for the case that the advancing and receding contact angles are constant with drop size, one can further simplify the above proportionality to f/V(1/3) = const where V is the drop volume. We show, however, that experimentally f/V(1/3) is usually a decaying function of V (rather than constant). The retention force increases with the time the drop rested on the surface prior to sliding. We show that this rested-time effect is similar for different drop sizes, and thus the change of f/V(1/3) with V occurs irrespective of the rested-time effect which suggests that the two effects are induced by different physical phenomena. The time effect is induced by the unsatisfied normal component of the Young equation which slowly deforms the surface with time, while the size effect is induced by time independent properties. According to the Dussan equation, the change of f/V(1/3) with V is also expressed in contact angle variation. Our results, however, show that contact angle variation that is within the scatter suffices to explain the significant force variation. Thus, it is easier to predict contact angle variation based on force variation rather than predicting force variation based on contact angle variation. A decrease of f/V(1/3) with V appears more common in the system studied compared to an increase.