This paper presents results for effects of the liquid surface tension on the ejected droplet volume using a pneumatic printing system. The low surface tension of the solution causes the liquid wetting around the nozzle, and then the wetted nozzle also inhibits stable formation of droplets. First, we confirmed the maximum inlet pressure (i.e., balanced with capillary force on the outlet channel) corresponding to varied surface tensions of the solutions, prepared by controlling the concentration of a surfactant. The ejected droplet volumes with the surfactant concentrations was varied within approximately 7% at each maximum inlet pressure, and the volume variation decreased to a fifth as compared with a high surface tension liquid.

In this paper, the movement of a liquid metal droplet in a channel by continuous electrowetting effect is analyzed. The channel is fabricated using two glass substrates and silicone rubber as spacers, and a mercury droplet and dilute sulfuric acid are added into the channel. The droplet is moved according to voltage applied at both ends of the channel through an electrolyte. According to the shape of the droplet and the applied voltage, the velocity of the droplet is changed. The velocity is proportional to the applied voltage and inversely proportional to the length of the droplet, both theoretically and experimentally. Contact angle hysteresis and a meniscus change were also found in the moving state. This implies the existence of a threshold in movement by Laplace pressure difference. The experiment indicated that the sliding angle was inversely proportional to the width of the droplet but that the voltage threshold was proportional to the width.

Oil retention experiments were conducted and the performance was characterized for electrochemically etched stainless steels. The 304 stainless steels were electrochemically etched in dilute Aqua Regia to form porous structures. The structures were also hierarchical, which provides very large area for oils to adhere. Also the structures had deep valleys, which act as reservoir and are able to resist against oil-detaching forces. Several commercial oils were dispensed to characterize oil retention properties via rotating disk experiment method. The results showed that the etched surfaces have superior oil retention performance in every conditions. Also the retention enhancement ratio went particularly higher as the environments became more severe. This surface modification technique could be applied to other steel products for pretreatments of various kinds of coatings.

This paper reports a simple, yet effective 1-step surface modification method for stainless steel. Electrochemical etching in dilute Aqua Regia forms hierarchical micro and nanoscale structure on the surface. The surface becomes highly hydrophobic (~150°) as a result of the etching in terms of static contact angle (CA). However the liquid drops easily pinned on the surface because of high contact angle hysteresis (CAH), which is called a “petal effect”. The petal effect occur because of gap between surface microstructures, despite of intrinsic hydrophobicity of the base material. The pore size and period of surface structure can be controlled by applied voltage during the etching. This method can be applied to wide variety of industrial demand for surface modification, while maintaining the advantageous anti-corrosion property of stainless steel.

In this study, we fabricated the superhydrophobic and super-water-repellent surface with the micro/nano scale structures using simple conventional silicon wet-etching technique and the black silicon method by deep reactive ion etching. These fabrication methods are simple but very effective. Also we reported the droplet impact experimental results on the micro/nano-scaled surface. There are two representative impact behaviors as “rebound” and “fragmentation”. We found the transition Weber number between “rebound” and “fragmentation” statements, experimentally. Additionally, we concerned about the dimensionless spreading diameters for our super-water-repellent surface. The novel characterization method was introduced for analysis including the “fragmentation” region. As a result, our super-water-repellent surface with the micro/nano-scaled structures shows the different impact behaviors compared with a reference smooth surface, by some meaningful experiments.

This paper presents results for dispensing and measuring micro-particles using a pneumatic dispensing system. Particle-suspended liquid droplets were dispensed and analyzed quantitatively at various particle concentrations and applied pressures. By using a developed experimental setup, the number of particles and the particle volume ratio in sequentially dispensed droplets were measured. Hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces were tested to find a suitable surface for counting the number of particle. It was confirmed that the dispensed particles concentrated into the center of the droplet on the smooth CD surface after evaporation of liquid. As the applied positive pressure increased, the number of particles per droplet increased consistently and the volume fraction of particles remained constant.