Energy harvesting due to charge redistribution upon drop impact – and – Swelling of partly saturated hydrophobic polymer brush layers

Description

The first part of this lecture I discuss how the energy of falling drops impacting onto pre-charged hydrophobic polymer surfaces can be harvested in an external electrical circuit as screening charges redistribute within the drop.
High speed video imaging and simultaneous electrical measurements lead to a physical model of the energy conversion process including a quantitative analysis of the conversion efficiency [1, 2].
Part two addresses preliminary experiments on the spreading of oil drops with a low vapor pressure on hydrophobic polymer brushes. Within a few hours the swelling process leads to the formation of a pronounced halo around the macroscopic contact line, where the thickness of the partially swollen brush layer varies by a few hundred nanometers over a lateral width of the order of 1mm. The experiments suggest that this seemingly static configuration is in fact stabilized by a very slow gradual evaporation and therefore intrinsically a non-equilibrium phenomenon.

Period	8 Nov 2021
Event title	Dynamic Wetting of Flexible, Adaptive, and Switchable Substrates 2021
Event type	Conference
Location	Freiburg, GermanyShow on map