Liquid Crystals with Patterned Molecular Orientation as an Electrolytic Active Medium

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method using surface-patterned liquid crystals as electrolytes to generate controllable electrokinetic flows for particle transport and mixing at microscale, without limitations on particle charge or type.

Contribution

It presents a new approach to create electrokinetic flows using patterned liquid crystal electrolytes with photo-aligned surfaces, enabling versatile and controllable microscale fluid manipulation.

Findings

Flow velocity depends quadratically on electric field strength.

Patterned LC electrolytes induce persistent, controllable vortices.

Transport of various particles along designed trajectories is achieved.

Abstract

Transport of fluids and particles at the microscale is an important theme both in fundamental and applied science. One of the most successful approaches is to use an electric field, which requires the system to carry or induce electric charges. We describe a versatile approach to generate electrokinetic flows by using a liquid crystal (LC) with surface-patterned molecular orientation as an electrolyte. The surface patterning is produced by photo-alignment. In the presence of an electric field, the spatially varying orientation induces space charges that trigger flows of the LC. The active patterned LC electrolyte converts the electric energy into the LC flows and transport of embedded particles of any type (fluid, solid, gaseous) along a predesigned trajectory, posing no limitation on the electric nature (charge, polarizability) of these particles and interfaces. The patterned LC electrolyte exhibits a quadratic field dependence of the flow velocities; it induces persistent vortices of controllable rotation speed and direction that are quintessential for micro- and nanoscale mixing applications.