STW VALORISATION GRANT: NEXT GENERATION MALDI-MS DETECTION THROUGH ELECTROWETTINGResearchers from the Physics of Complex Fluids Group are awarded an  STW Valorisation Grant for  exploring the commercialization of a “game changing” technique (eMALDI) for improving a workhorse method in analytical chemistry: Matrix assisted laser adsorption Ionization mass spectroscopy for short MALDI-MS.

First Prize MESA+ Meeting 2012 - David Reinhoudt Poster AwardThe poster titled ‘♪My drop will (not) go on ♫ - Trapping in electrically tunable potential wells ’ by Dieter ‘t Mannetje and Arjen Pit was selected as the first prize winner at the ‘MESA+ meeting 2012’ in Wolff Cinestar, Enschede.

High Speed adaptive liquid microlens arrayLiquid microlenses are attractive for adaptive optics because they offer the potential for both high speed actuation and parallelization into large arrays. Yet, in conventional designs, resonances of the liquid and the complexity of driving mechanisms and/or the device architecture have hampered a successful integration of both aspects. Here we present an array of up to 100 microlenses with synchronous modulation of the focal length at frequencies beyond 1 kHz using electrowetting.

PCF Poster prize: Trapping & control of dropletsThe poster titled ‘Droplet trapping & control on a single Electrowetting-on-dielectric surface’ by Dieter ‘t Mannetje et al. was selected as the second prize winner at the ‘International meeting on Electrowetting’ in Athens, Greece. The poster describes a method to trap and steer droplets of aqueous solutions using Electrowetting, and to filter them based on various properties such as viscosity and droplet size. Moreover, the model used to describe the system can be used for a wide variety of situations, including drops sliding down inclined planes as seen for rain on windows, drops blown off a surface by air flow as can be seen for airplanes, and drops in a two-phase flow driven by the surrounding medium as encountered in microfluidic applications.

Best paper of 2011 in EuroPhysics LettersThe article “Electric field-driven instability on superhydrophobic surfaces” by Jung Min Oh et al. has been selected for the collection of best publications in 2011 in EuroPhysics Letters. The publication describes the physical principles governing the switching of topographically structured surfaces from the superhydrophobic Cassie state to the conventional Wenzel wetting state using electrodes embedded on the substrate below the surface pattern. This work is part of the general research line on electrically switchable smart surfaces in the Physics of Complex Fluids group with various applications in microfluidics and optofluidics. The article is freely accessible at http://iopscience.iop.org/0295-5075/93/5/56001.

An airbag for drops (PRL 108, 2012)In a car accident airbags inflate on time scale of few milliseconds to slow down passengers in a comparably gentle manner before they hit the hard structure of the car or they prevent the impact altogether. Liquid drops impacting onto a solid surface, like rain drops hitting ground and inkjet drops hitting a print medium, experience a similar air-cushion effect that guarantees a soft landing, as Jolet de Ruiter and coworkers from Twente University report in the Physical Review Letters.