Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-15-2017

Abstract

This article investigates the effective liquid-gas surface tension changes of water and 5-90nm gold nanofluids measured during electrowetting on dielectric experiments. The Young-Laplace equation for sessile droplets in air was solved to fit the experimental droplet shape and determine the effective liquid-gas surface tension at each applied voltage. A good agreement between experimental droplet shapes and the predictions was observed for all the liquids investigated in applied range of 0-30V. The measured liquid-gas effective surface tensions of water and gold nanofluid decreased with voltage. At a given voltage, the effective liquid-gas surface tension of gold nanofluids initially decreased as the size of gold nanoparticles increased from 5 nm to 50 nm. Then, for 70nm and 90nm particle gold nanofluids, the effective liquid-gas surface tension started increasing too. The size of nanoparticles, and the applied voltage have a significant effect on variation of the effective liquid-gas surface tension with variations as much as 93% induced by voltage at a given particle size and 80% induced by particle size at a given voltage.

Copyright Statement

This is an author-produced, peer-reviewed version of this article. © 2017, Elsevier. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The final, definitive version of this document can be found online at Journal of Colloid and Interface Science. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2014.12.049

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