TY - JOUR
T1 - Gradient Droplet Arrays by Acceleration-Mode Dip-Coating
AU - Mandsberg, Nikolaj K.
AU - Shneidman, Anna V.
AU - Jensen, Kaare H.
AU - Taboryski, Rafael
AU - Nielsen, Line H.
AU - Aizenberg, Joanna
AU - Boisen, Anja
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Advanced Materials Interfaces published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Droplet microarray technology is of great interest in biology and chemistry as it allows for significant reactant savings and massive parallelization of experiments. Upon scaling down the footprint of each droplet in an array, it becomes increasingly challenging to produce the array drop-by-drop. Therefore, techniques for parallelized droplet production are developed, e.g., dip-coating of biphilic substrates. However, it is in general difficult to tailor the characteristics of individual droplets, such as size and content, without updating the substrate. Here, the method of dip-coating of uniformly patterned biphilic substrates in so-called “acceleration-mode” to produce droplet arrays featuring gradients in droplet height for fixed droplet footprint is developed. The results herein present this method applied to produce drops with base diameters varying over orders of magnitude, from as high as 6 mm to as small as 50 µm; importantly, the experimentally measured power-law-dependency of volume on capillary-number matches analytical theory for droplet formation on heterogenous substrates though the precise quantitative values likely differ due to 2D substrate patterning. Gradient characteristics, including average droplet volume, steepness of the gradient, and its monotonicity, can all be tuned by changing the dip-coating parameters, thus providing a robust method for high-throughput screening applications and experiments.
AB - Droplet microarray technology is of great interest in biology and chemistry as it allows for significant reactant savings and massive parallelization of experiments. Upon scaling down the footprint of each droplet in an array, it becomes increasingly challenging to produce the array drop-by-drop. Therefore, techniques for parallelized droplet production are developed, e.g., dip-coating of biphilic substrates. However, it is in general difficult to tailor the characteristics of individual droplets, such as size and content, without updating the substrate. Here, the method of dip-coating of uniformly patterned biphilic substrates in so-called “acceleration-mode” to produce droplet arrays featuring gradients in droplet height for fixed droplet footprint is developed. The results herein present this method applied to produce drops with base diameters varying over orders of magnitude, from as high as 6 mm to as small as 50 µm; importantly, the experimentally measured power-law-dependency of volume on capillary-number matches analytical theory for droplet formation on heterogenous substrates though the precise quantitative values likely differ due to 2D substrate patterning. Gradient characteristics, including average droplet volume, steepness of the gradient, and its monotonicity, can all be tuned by changing the dip-coating parameters, thus providing a robust method for high-throughput screening applications and experiments.
KW - Biphilic surfaces
KW - Combinatorial chemistry
KW - Droplet microarray technology
KW - High-throughput screening
KW - Parallelization of experiments
U2 - 10.1002/admi.202200667
DO - 10.1002/admi.202200667
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85133540268
SN - 2196-7350
VL - 9
JO - Advanced Materials Interfaces
JF - Advanced Materials Interfaces
IS - 22
M1 - 2200667
ER -