Abstract
The pursuit of mimicking complex multiscale systems has been a tireless effort with many successes but a daunting task ahead. A new perspective to engineer complex cross-linked meshes and branched/tree-like structures at different scales is presented here. Control over Saffman-Taylor instability which otherwise randomly rearranges viscous fluid in a ‘lifted Hele-Shaw cell’ is proposed for the same. The proposed control employs multiple-ports or source-holes in this cell, to spontaneously shape a stretched fluid film into a network of well defined webs/meshes and ordered multiscale tree-like patterns. Use of multiple ports enables exercising strong control to fabricate such structures, in a robust and repeated fashion, which otherwise are completely non-characteristic to viscous fingering process. The proposed technique is capable of fabricating spontaneously families of wide variety of structures over micro and very large scale in a period of few seconds. Thus the proposed method forms a solid foundation to new pathways for engineering multiscale structures for several scientific applications including efficient gas exchange, heat transport, tissue engineering, organ-on-chip, and so on. Proposal of multi-port Hele-Shaw cell also opens new avenues for investigation of complex multiple finger interactions resulting in interesting fluid patterns.
Highlights
The pursuit of mimicking complex multiscale systems has been a tireless effort with many successes but a daunting task ahead
Use of multiple ports enables exercising strong control to fabricate such structures, in a robust and repeated fashion, which otherwise are completely non-characteristic to viscous fingering process
The proposed method forms a solid foundation to new pathways for engineering multiscale structures for several scientific applications including efficient gas exchange, heat transport, tissue engineering, organ-on-chip, and so on
Summary
The pursuit of mimicking complex multiscale systems has been a tireless effort with many successes but a daunting task ahead. The proposed control employs multiple-ports or source-holes in this cell, to spontaneously shape a stretched fluid film into a network of well defined webs/meshes and ordered multiscale tree-like patterns. We propose a non-conventional, spontaneous, time-efficient, lithography-less method of shaping fluid into well-defined meshes and tree-like structures with source and sink segments by exercising control over Saffman-Taylor instability in a lifted Hele-Shaw cell. We recently proposed use of yield-stress fluids in a lifted Hele-Shaw cell to retain the structures permanently[34] and the use of pits as anisotropies to control the Saffman-Taylor instability for shaping/fabricating fractal-like structures[31]. In this paper, we use fundamentally different scientific principle of using multiple source-holes on the cell plate (forming what we term as multiport Hele-Shaw cell) inside stretched fluid interface. The shaping/fabrication process, irrespective of the structure scale, completes in a period of few seconds and the structures obtained are solidified followed by casting them into hollow channel-networks using an elastomer or a hydrogel as per the application requirement
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