Conspectus The control of droplet behavior has been investigated for several centuries due to its universality and significance in nature, daily life, and industrial applications. Diverse strategies have been developed and employed to regulate droplet behavior, and great progress has been achieved such as accelerated droplet bouncing, controlled droplet dispensing, and enhanced droplet adhesion. Compared with the strategies utilizing external fields including magnets, heat, light, and electricity as well as various topological structures, the heterogeneous wettability surface provides a facile and efficient way to manipulate droplet behavior and thus has aroused increasing research interest in many fields. The heterogeneous wettability substrate integrates wettable and less wettable regions onto an individual surface, with rational design and a geometrical arrangement. Therefore, it shows more precise, diverse, and controllable interactions with droplets than homogeneous surfaces. In addition to confining the droplet position and morphology and regulating the droplet dynamics, the nonuniformity in wettability can induce a difference in electrical conductivity, nucleation energy barriers, and so forth, which greatly extends its application in the fields of functional materials deposition and device fabrication. In this Account, recent progress in the precise droplet manipulation based on heterogeneous wettability is summarized. First, the principle of droplet control by a heterogeneous surface and the development of the green printing technique based on this principle are introduced. Then the droplet manipulation, categorized as droplet patterning, droplet isolation, and droplet dynamics, is described. Meanwhile, related applications, such as high-capacity information coding, highly sensitive detection, and high-performance optic/electric device fabrication, are demonstrated. In addition, the general principle for controlling the droplet impact using heterogeneous wettability substrates is highlighted. Finally, a brief summary of this Account, with challenges and opportunities in this field, is proposed.
Heterostructures have attracted enormous interest due to the properties arising from the coupling and synergizing between multiscale structures and the promising applications in electronics, mechanics, and optics. However, it is challenging for current technologies to precisely integrate cross-scale micro/nanomaterials in three dimensions (3D). Herein, we realize the precise spatial allocation of nanoblocks on micromatrices and programmable 3D optical heterostructure patterning via printing-assisted self-assembly. This bottom-up approach fully exploits the advantages of printing in on-demand patterning, low cost, and mass production, as well as the merits of solution-based colloidal assembly for simple structuring and high-precision regulating, which facilitates the patterned integration of multiscale materials. Importantly, the luminescent nanoparticle assembly can be accurately coupled to the dye-doped polymer matrix by regulating the interface wettability, enabling facile multicolor tuning in a single heterostructure. Thus, the heterostructure can be specially encoded for anticounterfeiting and encryption applications due to the morphology-dependent and interface-coupling-induced luminescence. Moreover, with the capability to achieve single-nanoparticle resolution, these findings have great potential for designing photonic superstructures and advanced optical devices.
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