Microstructured surfaces with pillar arrays are widely used to control the wetting morphology and spreading dynamics of droplets. In both simulations and experiments, it is shown that fabricating the surface with various microstructures is a very effective method for achieving the desired symmetry of the moving contact line. However, the method for characterizing miscellaneous pillar-arrayed microstructured surfaces is still insufficient. This paper presents the configurational entropy to characterize the microstructured surfaces with pillar arrays. By calculating the configurational entropy of pillar-arrayed microstructured surfaces, the relationship between the configurational entropy and the wetting morphology of droplets is obtained. For pillar-arrayed microstructured surfaces with the configurational entropy S > 0, the droplet wetting morphology may be much more complex than those with S = 0. The relationship is found to be consistent with the previous results. Furthermore, the wetting dynamics has been analysed. This study may be useful to understand the mechanism of droplet wetting on pillar-arrayed microstructured surfaces and provide insights for the design and manufacture of microstructured surfaces.

It is demonstrated how aqueous droplets with volumes down to the sub-femtolitre range can be manipulated, including the withdrawal of minute samples from the droplets. The underlying principle is that of partial coalescence with a liquid reservoir in an applied electric field. Upon partial coalescence, a droplet merges with a reservoir and reappears with a smaller diameter. The droplets studied here perform a reciprocating motion between two reservoirs during which their volume gets reduced. Manipulation of droplets with diameters down to 400 nm is reported. A similarity relation is derived expressing the ratio of droplet diameters before and after partial coalescence as a function of the ratio between electric and interfacial-tension forces. The presented scheme allows the withdrawal of minute samples from small droplets and could prove helpful in various applications where droplets are used as tiny reaction spaces or when the goal is to tailor the size of individual droplets.

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has expanded to include UAV sprayers capable of applying pesticides. Very little research has been conducted to optimize application parameters and measure the potential of off-target movement from UAV-based pesticide applications. Field experiments were conducted in Raleigh, NC during spring 2018 to characterize the effect of different application speeds and nozzle types on target area coverage and uniformity of UAV applications. The highest coverage was achieved with an application speed of 1 m s−1 and ranged from 30% to 60%, whereas applications at 7 m s−1 yielded 13% to 22% coverage. Coverage consistently decreased as application speed increased across all nozzles, with extended-range flat-spray nozzles declining at a faster rate than air-induction nozzles, likely due to higher drift. Experiments measuring the drift potential of UAV-applied pesticides using extended-range flat spray, air-induction flat-spray, turbo air–induction flat-spray, and hollow-cone nozzles under 0, 2, 4, 7, and 9 m s−1 perpendicular wind conditions in the immediate 1.75 m above the target were conducted in the absence of natural wind. Off-target movement was observed under all perpendicular wind conditions with all nozzles tested but was nondetectable beyond 5 m away from the target. Coverage from all nozzles exhibited a concave-shaped curve in response to the increasing perpendicular wind speed due to turbulence. The maximum target coverage in drift studies was observed when the perpendicular wind was 0 and 8.94 m s−1, but higher turbulence at the two highest perpendicular wind speeds (6.71 and 8.94 m s−1) increased coverage variability, whereas the lowest variability was observed at 2.24 m s−1 wind speed. Results suggested that air-induction flat-spray and turbo air–induction flat-spray nozzles and an application speed of 3 m s−1 provided an adequate coverage of target areas while minimizing off-target movement risk.

In this paper, a droplet to film interaction model technique is presented. In the proposed approach, the liquid and gas continua are modelled using an enhanced Volume-of-Fluid (VoF) technique while the droplets are tracked using a Lagrangian framework and are coupled to the Eulerian phases using source terms. The eventual target application is an aeroengine bearing chamber in which oil is found as droplets, shed from the bearings, splashing on impact, separated from wall surfaces at obstacles or simply re-entrained, and as a continuum oil film coating the bearing chamber outer walls which it also cools. In finite volume Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques, a prohibitively large number of cells would be required to describe the details of the droplet impact phenomenon. Based on published correlations, the splashing droplets are created and tracked as Lagrangian particles. The flowing film and the gas continua are handled with an enhanced VoF technique.

Fenoxaprop, fluazifop/fluazifop-P, haloxyfop, and quizalofop at 0.14 kg ai ha−1 and sethoxydim at 0.28 kg ai ha−1 were applied broadcast over-the-top in spray volumes of 94 and 374 L ha−1, each at 138 and 345 kPa, to control johnsongrass in soybeans over a 5-yr period. The two spray volumes provided equal control, but control was better when treatments were applied at 345 kPa than at 138 kPa. There were no significant interactions among herbicides, spray volumes, or spray pressures. Most of the spray was deposited on the upper surface of the plant canopy. Less than 10% of the herbicide spray applied penetrated into the canopy onto water-sensitive spray cards located 10, 20, 30, or 40 cm above the ground.

Cavitation bubbles, which always exist in the diesel jet leaving the nozzle and in diesel droplets breaking up from the jet as a result of supercavitation of the diesel within the injection nozzle, increase the instability of jet and droplets in part due to the two-phase mixture, while the mechanism of this effect is still unclear. Cavitation bubble expansion within the diesel droplet has been simulated numerically based on the volume of fluid (VOF) method, and the control mechanism of bubble growth process is analyzed by Rayleigh-Plesset equation. The process of bubble growth is divided into three parts, including surface tension controlled domain, comprehensive competition controlled domain and inertial force controlled domain. During the first stage, cavitation bubble growth is controlled by the surface tension, and the decrease of the surface tension leads to the increase of the bubble growth rate. During the second stage, the bubble growth rate is controlled by the comprehensive competition of the surface tension, the inertial force and the viscous force. During the third stage, the process of bubble growth is majorly controlled by the inertial force.

Newtonian and non-Newtonian dispersed phase droplet formation in non-Newtonian continuous phase in T-junction and cross junction microchannels are investigated by the immiscible lattice BGK model. The effects of the non-Newtonian fluid power-law exponent, viscosity and interfacial tension on the generation of the droplet are studied. The final droplet size, droplet generation frequency, and detachment point of the droplet change with the power-law exponent. The results reveal that it is necessary to take into account the non-Newtonian rheology instead of simple Newtonian fluid assumption in numerical simulations. The present analysis also demonstrates that the lattice Boltzmann method is of potential to investigate the non-Newtonian droplet generation in multiphase flow.

The aim of the present study was to clarify the efficacy of the well of the well (WOW) culture system for a small number of embryos and the effect of number of adjacent embryos in a WOW dish on blastocyst development. In conventional droplet culture, embryos in the small-number group (5–6 embryos/droplet) showed low blastocyst development compared with a control group (25–26 embryos/droplet). However, small and large numbers of embryos (5–6 and 25 embryos, respectively) in a WOW dish showed no significant differences in cleavage, blastocyst rates, and mean cell number in blastocysts compared with the control group (25–30 embryos/droplet). In addition, the number of adjacent embryos in a WOW dish did not affect the development to blastocysts and cell number in blastocysts. In conclusion, a WOW dish can provide high and stable blastocyst development in small group culture wherever embryos are placed in microwells of the WOW dish.