2003/03/09 by Cecile Cottin-Bizonne, Cécile Cottin-Bizonne, Jean‐Louis Barrat +5 · 2 citations
Engineering · Environmental Science · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer #Minerals Flotation and Separation Techniques #Surface Modification and Superhydrophobicity #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/nmat857
published as Nature Materials 2 (2003) 238
openalex publication_date 2003/03/09 · arxiv created 2003/04/02 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
With the recent important development of microfluidic systems, miniaturization of flow devices has become a real challenge. Microchannels, however, are characterized by a large surface to volume ratio, so that surface properties strongly affect flow resistance in submicrometric devices. We present here results showing that the concerted effect of wetting . properties and surface roughness may considerably reduce friction of the fluid past the boundaries. The slippage of the fluid at the channel boundaries is shown to be drastically increased by using surfaces that are patterned at the nanometer scale. This effect occurs in the regime where the surface pattern is partially dewetted, in the spirit of the 'superhydrophobic' effects that have been recently discovered at the macroscopic scales. Our results show for the first time that, in contrast to the common belief, surface friction may be reduced by surface roughness. They also open the possibility of a controlled realization of the 'nanobubbles' that have long been suspected to play a role in interfacial slippage