Fluid dynamics articles within Nature Communications

Featured

  • Article |

    Control over microparticle motions in flows allows the high throughput performance of operations on individual flowing objects. Uspal et al.show that particles with asymmetric shape can be focused to the centreline of microfluidic channels when driven by flow without the help of external forces.

    • William E. Uspal
    • , H Burak Eral
    •  & Patrick S. Doyle

  • Article |

    Particle focusing in microfluidic channels can be done in viscoelastic mediums such as synthetic polymer solutions. Kang et al.report that dilute DNA solutions are more efficient elasticity enhancers for this purpose and the same degree of focusing can be achieved at much lower concentrations.

    • Kyowon Kang
    • , Sung Sik Lee
    •  & Ju Min Kim

  • Article |

    Manipulating droplet morphology on surfaces is important for engineering applications such as thermal management and microfluidics. Adera et al. show a control strategy where non-wetting droplets are formed by mild heating superhydrophilic surfaces beyond the saturation temperature of the liquid.

    • Solomon Adera
    • , Rishi Raj
    •  & Evelyn N. Wang

  • Article |

    When two droplets on a superhydrophobic surface coalesce, the excess surface energy causes the merged droplet to jump away from the surface. Miljkovic et al.find that this process also causes the droplets to become charged, enabling them to be manipulated with an electric field.

    • Nenad Miljkovic
    • , Daniel J. Preston
    •  & Evelyn N. Wang

  • Article |

    Controlling liquids at small scales is of importance for applications in microfluidics. Ortiz-Young et al.show that shear forces in nanoconfined water change dramatically if the confining surface is either hydrophobic or hydrophilic, offering a new understanding of the flow of liquids on the nanoscale.

    • Deborah Ortiz-Young
    • , Hsiang-Chih Chiu
    •  & Elisa Riedo

  • Article |

    A physical description of supercritical fluids remains challenging because common approximations for solids and gases do not apply to liquids. Bolmatov et al. identify a liquid/gas dynamic crossover of specific heat above the critical point, and formulate a theory to shed light on its nature.

    • Dima Bolmatov
    • , V. V. Brazhkin
    •  & K. Trachenko

  • Article |

    Patchiness in the distribution of phytoplankton promotes many of the ecological interactions that underpin the marine food web. This study shows that turbulence, ubiquitous in the ocean, counter-intuitively ‘unmixes’ a population of motile phytoplankton, generating intense, small-scale patchiness in its distribution.

    • William M. Durham
    • , Eric Climent
    •  & Roman Stocker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electron transfer from solute to solvent has a crucial role in chemistry, but this process has not yet been visualized in real time. Messina et al.provide the first real-time observation of the dynamic rearrangement of water cages around aqueous halides before full electron ejection.

    • Fabrizio Messina
    • , Olivier Bräm
    •  & Majed Chergui

  • Article |

    The nature of liquid–liquid phase transitions remains inconclusive, because direct experimental evidence is limited by crystallization. Wei et al.observe it in a bulk metallic glass former, which is characterized by heat capacity maxima and sudden changes in both viscosity and local structures.

    • Shuai Wei
    • , Fan Yang
    •  & Ralf Busch

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The melting temperature of hydrogen drops at high pressures, which suggests the possible emergence of a low-temperature liquid state of metallic hydrogen. Chen et al.confirm the existence of this phase in simulations and show how the quantum motion of the protons has a critical role in its stabilization.

    • Ji Chen
    • , Xin-Zheng Li
    •  & Enge Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The self-assembly of colloidal structures at liquid interfaces finds immediate application in industry, such as food and drug encapsulations. Dommersnes et al. develop a technique to manipulate the distribution of colloidal particles adsorbed on drop surfaces under an applied electric field.

    • Paul Dommersnes
    • , Zbigniew Rozynek
    •  & Jon Otto Fossum

  • Article |

    A better understanding of many environmental phenomena, such as plankton spreading in the ocean, relies on knowledge of the dispersion statistics. Xia et al. trace particles' trajectories in laboratory turbulence and reveal that a single force scale can be sufficient to predict the dispersion of particles.

    • Hua Xia
    • , Nicolas Francois
    •  & Michael Shats

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The coffee ring effect is commonly observed in drying droplets containing suspended matter leading to a deposition at the droplet edge. Sempels et al. show that self-generated biosurfactants in living bacterial systems reverse the coffee ring effect and result in a homogeneous deposition.

    • Wouter Sempels
    • , Raf De Dier
    •  & Jan Vermant

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Superfluids experience drag from container walls and dissipate energy because of quantized vortices and turbulence. Hosio et al. find that in a 3He superfluid at temperatures approaching absolute zero, friction with the walls disappears like in an ideal liquid, while energy dissipation remains finite.

    • J. J. Hosio
    • , V. B. Eltsov
    •  & V. S. L’vov

  • Article |

    New printing techniques demand methods capable of spreading uniform liquid films efficiently across surfaces. McHale et al.show that applying external electric fields to non-charged liquids can achieve this goal without complicated surface modification or adding surfactants in the liquids.

    • G. McHale
    • , C. V. Brown
    •  & N. Sampara

  • Article |

    Glasses are solid when cold, but when mixed with the correct dye can be fluidized by light. Fang et al.show that each photon absorbed in an azobenzen-based molecule layer produces an efficient local heating up to 800 K to melt the glass but without altering the average temperature.

    • G.J. Fang
    • , J.E. Maclennan
    •  & N.A. Clark

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The motion of liquid drops on surfaces is governed by adhesion forces, but the microscopic mechanism is unclear. Paxson et al. image the dynamic distortion of the edge of a droplet as it moves across a surface, allowing them to predict the wetting ability of different hierarchically textured surfaces.

    • Adam T. Paxson
    •  & Kripa K. Varanasi

  • Article |

    Electricity can be generated by moving wires in magnetic fields, but this is not the only method. Moon et al. develop an electrochemical device that produces an AC current in a controlled manner by mechanically modulating water bridges sandwiched between two conducting plates.

    • Jong Kyun Moon
    • , Jaeki Jeong
    •  & Hyuk Kyu Pak

  • Article |

    Ink-jet printing methods are an attractive approach to nanofabrication, where electrohydrodynamic control allows for flexible and cheap fabrication. Here, a new approach is presented using electrostatic nanodroplet autofocussing to produce high aspect ratio nanoscale structures like plasmonic nanoantennas.

    • P. Galliker
    • , J. Schneider
    •  & D. Poulikakos

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A bubble at an air–liquid interface can form a liquid jet upon bursting, spraying aerosol droplets into the air. Leeet al. show that jetting is analogous to pinching-off in liquid coalescence, which may be useful in applications that prevent jet formation and in the improved incorporation of aerosols in climate models.

    • Ji San Lee
    • , Byung Mook Weon
    •  & Wah-Keat Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pattern-forming processes in simple fluids and suspensions are well understood, but displacement morphologies in frictional fluids and granular mixtures have not been studied extensively. Sandneset al. consider the effects of Coulomb friction and compressibility on the fluid dynamics of granular mixtures.

    • B. Sandnes
    • , E.G. Flekkøy
    •  & H. See

Browse broader subjects

Browse Fluid dynamics across other nature.com journals