Abstract

The contact between liquid drops and hot solid surfaces is of practical importance for industrial processes, such as thermal spraying and spray cooling. The contact and bouncing of solid spheres is also an important event encountered in ball milling, powder processing, and everyday activities, such as ball sports. Using high speed video microscopy, we demonstrate that hydrogel drops, initially at rest on a surface, spontaneously jump upon rapid heating and continue to bounce with increasing amplitudes. Jumping is governed by the surface wettability, surface temperature, hydrogel elasticity, and adhesion. A combination of low-adhesion impact behavior and fast water vapor formation supports continuous bouncing and trampolining. Our results illustrate how the interplay between solid and liquid characteristics of hydrogels results in intriguing dynamics, as reflected by spontaneous jumping, bouncing, trampolining, and extremely short contact times.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-13-2017

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Nature Communications, v. 8, issue 1, article no. 905, p. 1-9.

© The Author(s) 2017

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-01010-8

Funding Information

This work was supported by an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship (J.T.P.), the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program No. 722497—LubISS (D.V.), and the ERC advanced grant SUPRO 340391 and ITN COWET (H.-J.B.).

Related Content

The data obtained and analyzed that support the findings of this study are available upon reasonable request. Supplementary Information accompanies this paper at doi:10.1038/s41467-017-01010-8.

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Supplementary Information

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Description of Additional Supplementary Files

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Supplementary Movie 1

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Supplementary Movie 10

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