Issue 40, 2016

Collective dynamics of chemically active particles trapped at a fluid interface

Abstract

Chemically active colloids generate changes in the chemical composition of their surrounding solution and thereby induce flows in the ambient fluid which affect their dynamical evolution. Here we study the many-body dynamics of a monolayer of spherically symmetric active particles trapped at a fluid–fluid interface. To this end we consider a model for the large-scale spatial distribution of particles which incorporates the direct pair interaction (including also the capillary interaction which is caused specifically by the interfacial trapping) as well as the effect of hydrodynamic interactions (including the Marangoni flow induced by the response of the interface to the chemical activity). The values of the relevant physical parameters for typical experimental realizations of such systems are estimated and various scenarios, which are predicted by our approach for the dynamics of the monolayer, are discussed. In particular, we show that the chemically-induced Marangoni flow can prevent the clustering instability driven by the capillary attraction.

Graphical abstract: Collective dynamics of chemically active particles trapped at a fluid interface

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
24 Jun 2016
Accepted
13 Sep 2016
First published
14 Sep 2016

Soft Matter, 2016,12, 8398-8406

Collective dynamics of chemically active particles trapped at a fluid interface

A. Domínguez, P. Malgaretti, M. N. Popescu and S. Dietrich, Soft Matter, 2016, 12, 8398 DOI: 10.1039/C6SM01468B

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