Evaluation of repeated electrowetting on three different fluoropolymer top coatings

Degradation of the electrowetting effect by a repeated actuation is evaluated over an extended period (200 min) on electrowetting-on-dielectric samples for three popular fluoropolymer top coatings: Teflon, FluoroPel and Cytop. A conductive liquid droplet is tested in an air environment at electrowetting number Ew ≅ 0.34. A pulse train (6 s period and 50% duty cycle) of three different voltage types is used for the actuation: positive dc, negative dc and 1 kHz ac. For the dc actuations, electrowetting degrades gradually on Cytop but significantly faster on Teflon and FluoroPel under the tested conditions. For the ac actuation, electrowetting degrades gradually on all three materials in a similar fashion. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd.

[1]  Y. Fouillet,et al.  Rotating flow within a droplet actuated with AC EWOD , 2009 .

[2]  G. Ramanath,et al.  Electrowetting on dielectric-actuation of microdroplets of aqueous bismuth telluride nanoparticle suspensions , 2007 .

[3]  C. Werner,et al.  Electrokinetic Measurements Reveal Interfacial Charge at Polymer Films Caused by Simple Electrolyte Ions , 2001 .

[4]  H. Verheijen,et al.  REVERSIBLE ELECTROWETTING AND TRAPPING OF CHARGE : MODEL AND EXPERIMENTS , 1999, cond-mat/9908328.

[5]  Wyatt C. Nelson,et al.  Droplet Actuation by Electrowetting-on-Dielectric (EWOD): A Review , 2012 .

[6]  Behrouz Abedian,et al.  Irreversible electrowetting on thin fluoropolymer films. , 2007, Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids.

[7]  Manjeet Dhindsa,et al.  Electrowetting without electrolysis on self-healing dielectrics. , 2011, Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids.

[8]  C. Kim,et al.  An integrated digital microfluidic chip for multiplexed proteomic sample preparation and analysis by MALDI-MS. , 2006, Lab on a chip.

[9]  J. Baret,et al.  Electrowetting: from basics to applications , 2005 .

[10]  B. Berge,et al.  Variable focal lens controlled by an external voltage: An application of electrowetting , 2000 .

[11]  C. Kim,et al.  Electrowetting and electrowetting-on-dielectric for microscale liquid handling , 2002 .

[12]  R. J. Schwartz,et al.  Electrofluidic displays using Young-Laplace transposition of brilliant pigment dispersions , 2009 .

[13]  Jason Heikenfeld,et al.  Experimental Validation of the Invariance of Electrowetting Contact Angle Saturation , 2012 .

[14]  Richard B. Fair,et al.  Digital microfluidics: is a true lab-on-a-chip possible? , 2007 .

[15]  B. J. Feenstra,et al.  Video-speed electronic paper based on electrowetting , 2003, Nature.

[16]  Saman Sadeghi,et al.  Micro-chemical synthesis of molecular probes on an electronic microfluidic device , 2011, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[17]  S. Cho,et al.  Low voltage electrowetting-on-dielectric , 2002 .

[18]  John Ralston,et al.  Influence of the Electrical Double Layer in Electrowetting , 2003 .

[19]  Robert A. Hayes,et al.  Amorphous fluoropolymers as insulators for reversible low-voltage electrowetting , 2001 .