4.8 Article

Electrostatic tweezer for droplet manipulation

Publisher

NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2105459119

Keywords

tweezer; droplet manipulation; electrostatic induction; SERS

Funding

  1. National Natural Science Foundation of China [31771083]
  2. Research Grants Council of Hong Kong [C1018-17G, 11275216, 11218417]
  3. Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Council [JCYJ20170413141208098]
  4. City University of Hong Kong [9680212, 9610375]

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A versatile droplet electrostatic tweezer (DEST) is proposed to remotely and programmatically manipulate droplets, offering potential applications.
Various physical tweezers for manipulating liquid droplets based on optical, electrical, magnetic, acoustic, or other external fields have emerged and revolutionized research and application in medical, biological, and environmental fields. Despite notable progress, the existing modalities for droplet control and manipulation are still limited by the extra responsive additives and relatively poor controllability in terms of droplet motion behaviors, such as distance, velocity, and direction. Herein, we report a versatile droplet electrostatic tweezer (DEST) for remotely and programmatically trapping or guiding the liquid droplets under diverse conditions, such as in open and closed spaces and on flat and tilted surfaces as well as in oil medium. DEST, leveraging on the coulomb attraction force resulting from its electrostatic induction to a droplet, could manipulate droplets of various compositions, volumes, and arrays on various substrates, offering a potential platform for a series of applications, such as high-throughput surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy detection with single measuring time less than 20 s.

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