Abstract
Manipulating liquids with tunable shape and optical functionalities in real time is important for electroactive flow devices and optoelectronic devices, but remains a great challenge. Here, we demonstrate electrotunable liquid sulfur microdroplets in an electrochemical cell. We observe electrowetting and merging of sulfur droplets under different potentiostatic conditions, and successfully control these processes via selective design of sulfiphilic/sulfiphobic substrates. Moreover, we employ the electrowetting phenomena to create a microlens based on the liquid sulfur microdroplets and tune its characteristics in real time through changing the shape of the liquid microdroplets in a fast, repeatable, and controlled manner. These studies demonstrate a powerful in situ optical battery platform for unraveling the complex reaction mechanism of sulfur chemistries and for exploring the rich material properties of the liquid sulfur, which shed light on the applications of liquid sulfur droplets in devices such as microlenses, and potentially other electrotunable and optoelectronic devices.
Highlights
Manipulating liquids with tunable shape and optical functionalities in real time is important for electroactive flow devices and optoelectronic devices, but remains a great challenge
According to classical nucleation theory, the transformation of polysulfides to heterogeneously-nucleated elemental sulfur needs to overcome the free energy barrier related to the kinetics of the critical sulfur clusters[21,22,24,25,26], which can be overcome by increasing the overpotential of the polysulfide oxidation processes (Fig. 1c)
As discussed in an earlier work[18], the electrochemical potential is the electrochemical equivalent to temperature as an extensive variable that determines in the nucleation and growth of condensation droplets
Summary
Manipulating liquids with tunable shape and optical functionalities in real time is important for electroactive flow devices and optoelectronic devices, but remains a great challenge. We employ the electrowetting phenomena to create a microlens based on the liquid sulfur microdroplets and tune its characteristics in real time through changing the shape of the liquid microdroplets in a fast, repeatable, and controlled manner These studies demonstrate a powerful in situ optical battery platform for unraveling the complex reaction mechanism of sulfur chemistries and for exploring the rich material properties of the liquid sulfur, which shed light on the applications of liquid sulfur droplets in devices such as microlenses, and potentially other electrotunable and optoelectronic devices. The necessity for complex surface structure design/modification or irreversible transformation and slow response time are still challenges that need to be addressed Electrowetting is another facile and effective strategy to manipulate liquid by controlling the liquid wettability on a surface via applying an external electric field with the advantages of fast response and simple implementation without the need of complex surface structuring and patterning (Supplementary Fig. 1a). Our findings enable active control of the wettability of sulfur on conducting surfaces, open a variety of possibilities beyond common wettability control architectures such as wetting of water/oil on insulating substrates, and broaden the applications of supercooled liquid materials
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