Spontaneous motion of droplet in tubes: The effects of surface wettability and segment length

Abstract

This work studies the spontaneous droplet flow in tubes with different wettability gradient and number of segments by using a particle-based numerical method, many-body dissipative particle dynamics (MDPD). The study aims to understand how the different contact angle sets (gradient contact angle distribution along with different segments of a tube) and the number of segments could affect the droplet flow velocity and time to reaching a stable state. Simulation results show that even with the same wettability gap, a contact angle set with higher values of contact angle along the tube segments can drive the droplet to flow faster in the tubes; moreover, with the same contact angle set and tube length, the tubes with fewer segments can allow a faster flow of droplet, thus a shorter time to reaching the stable state. The numerical findings in this work can provide a new idea and direction for the design of droplet-based microfluidic systems.