Charge-Powered Electrotaxis for Versatile Droplet Manipulation

作者：Jin, Yuankai; Liu, Xiaonan; Xu, Wanghuai; Sun, Pengcheng; Huang, Siping; Yang, Siyan; Yang, Xiao; Wang, Qinggong; Lam, Raymond H. W.; Li, Ruirui^*; Wang, Zuankai^*

来源：ACS Nano, 2023, 17(11): 10713-10720.

DOI：10.1021/acsnano.3c01919

• electrotaxis
• droplet manipulation
• interface
• taxis
• charge

Taxis is an instinctive behavior of living organismsto externaldangers or benefits. Here, we report a taxis-like behavior associatedwith liquid droplets on charged substrates in response to the externalstimuli, referred to as droplet electrotaxis. Such droplet electrotaxisenables us to use either solid or liquid (such as water) matter, evena human finger, as stimuli to spatiotemporal precisely manipulatethe liquid droplets of various physicochemical properties, includingwater, ethanol with low surface tension, viscous oil, and so on. Dropletelectrotaxis also features a flexible configuration that even canmanifest in the presence of an additional layer, such as the ceramicwith a thickness of similar to 10 mm. More importantly, superior to existingelectricity-based strategies, droplet electrotaxis can harness thecharges generated from diverse manners, including pyroelectricity,triboelectricity, piezoelectricity, and so on. These properties dramaticallyincrease the application scenarios of droplet electrotaxis, such ascell labeling and droplet information recording.