Viscosity-Mediated Growth and Coalescence of Surface Nanodroplets

TL;DR

This study reveals that solvent viscosity significantly influences the growth, coalescence, and size distribution of surface nanodroplets during solvent exchange, enabling controlled nanodroplet formation for enhanced detection applications.

Contribution

It introduces the role of solvent viscosity in mediating nanodroplet growth and coalescence, providing a new method to control droplet size distribution without templates.

Findings

High viscosity causes deviation from existing growth scaling laws.

Viscous solutions hinder droplet coalescence, resulting in bimodal size distribution.

Small droplets in viscous environments improve fluorescence detection sensitivity.

Abstract

Solvent exchange is a simple method to produce surface nanodroplets on a substrate for a wide range of applications by displacing a solution of good solvent, poor solvent and oil (Solution A) by a poor solvent (Solution B). In this work, we show that the growth and coalescence of nanodroplets on a homogeneous surface is mediated by the viscosity of the solvent. We show that at high flow rates of viscous Solution B, the final droplet volume deviates from the scaling law that correlates final droplet volume to the flow rate of non-viscous Solution B, reported in previous work. We attribute this deviation to a two-regime growth in viscous Solution B, where transition from an initial, fast regime to a final slow regime influenced by the flow rate. Moreover, viscous solution B hinders the coalescence of growing droplets, leading to a distinct bimodal distribution of droplet size with stable nanodroplets, in contrast to a continuous size distribution of droplets in non-viscous case. We demonstrate that the group of small droplets produced in high viscosity environment may be applied for enhanced fluorescence detection with higher sensitivity and shorter response time. The finding of this work can potentially be applied for mediating the size distribution of surface nanodroplets on homogeneous surface without templates.