Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 113, Issue 45, Pages 12633-12636Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1606217113
Keywords
capillarity; surface tension; contact angle; Young-Laplace equation
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Funding
- Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad [FIS2015-66523-P]
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When a capillary is half-filled with liquid and turned to the horizontal, the liquid may flow out of the capillary or remain in it. For lack of a better criterion, the standard assumption is that the liquid will remain in a capillary of narrow cross-section, and will flow out otherwise. Here, we present a precise mathematical criterion that determines which of the two outcomes occurs for capillaries of arbitrary crosss-ectional shape, and show that the standard assumption fails for certain simple geometries, leading to very rich and counterintuitive behavior. This opens the possibility of creating very sensitive micro fluidic devices that respond readily to small physical changes, for instance, by triggering the sudden displacement of fluid along a capillary without the need of any external pumping.
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