Self-propulsion of chemically-active droplets

TL;DR

This paper reviews the recent advances in understanding how chemically-active droplets self-propel through nonlinear solute transport and Marangoni flows, highlighting their complex dynamics and potential applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the mathematical, physical, and experimental modeling of chemically-active droplets, emphasizing recent developments in the field.

Findings

Droplets can spontaneously swim due to nonlinear coupling of solute transport and Marangoni flows.

Secondary transitions lead to complex individual and collective behaviors.

The field is rapidly growing with applications in synthetic biology and biomedical engineering.

Abstract

Microscopic active droplets are able to swim autonomously in viscous flows: this puzzling feature stems from solute exchanges with the surrounding fluid via surface reactions or their spontaneous solubilisation, and the interfacial flows resulting from these solutes' gradients. Contrary to asymmetric active colloids, these isotropic droplets swim spontaneously by exploiting the nonlinear coupling of solute transport with self-generated Marangoni flows, which is also responsible for secondary transitions to more complex individual and collective dynamics. Thanks to their simple design and their sensitivity to physico-chemical signals, they are fascinating physicists, chemists, biologists and fluid dynamicists alike to analyse viscous self-propulsion and collective dynamics in active matter systems, to develop synthetic cellular models or to perform targeted biomedical or engineering applications. I review here the most recent and significant developments of this rapidly-growing field, focusing on the mathematical and physical modelling of these intringuing droplets, together with its experimental design and characterisation.