Phys.org December 1, 2024 Marangoni surfers are simple, cost-effective tabletop experiments that, despite their simplicity, exhibit rich dynamics and collective behaviors driven by physicochemical mechanisms, hydrodynamic interactions, and inertial motion. An international team of researchers (the Netherlands, USA – Harvard University) designed, developed and manufactured self-propelled particles to move on the air-water interface. They had tunable motility, and surface tension-mediated forces-controlled particle-particle interactions. Rapid prototyping through 3D printing facilitated the exploration of a wide design space, enabled precise control over particle shape and function. They investigated self-assembly in the system and highlighted its potential for modular designs where mechanically linked […]
Tag Archives: Air-water interface
How light can vaporize water without the need for heat
MIT News April 23, 2024 Although water is almost transparent to visible light, researchers at MIT demonstrated that the air–water interface interacts strongly with visible light via what they hypothesized as the photomolecular effect. In this effect, transverse-magnetic polarized photons cleave off water clusters from the air–water interface. They used 14 different experiments to demonstrate the existence of this effect and its dependence on the wavelength, incident angle, and polarization of visible light. They also demonstrated that visible light heats up thin fogs, suggesting that this process could impact weather, climate, and the earth’s water cycle and that it provided […]