Showing papers by "Benliang Zhu published in 2016"
TL;DR: The movement of the dispensed droplets is controllable by the direction and the strength of an electric field potentially allowing the use of the droplet for extracting analytes from small sample volume or placing a droplet onto a pre-patterned surface.
Abstract: Dispensing and manipulation of small droplets is important in bioassays, chemical analysis and patterning of functional inks. So far, dispensing of small droplets has been achieved by squeezing the liquid out of a small orifice similar in size to the droplets. Here we report that instead of squeezing the liquid out, small droplets can also be dispensed advantageously from large orifices by draining the liquid out of a drop suspended from a nozzle. The droplet volume is adjustable from attolitre to microlitre. More importantly, the method can handle suspensions and liquids with viscosities as high as thousands mPa s markedly increasing the range of applicable liquids for controlled dispensing. Furthermore, the movement of the dispensed droplets is controllable by the direction and the strength of an electric field potentially allowing the use of the droplet for extracting analytes from small sample volume or placing a droplet onto a pre-patterned surface. Dispensing small droplets is essential to many ink printing, chemical and biological technologies, but the conventional orifice-based methods fail when the size of droplets approaches sub-micrometre range. Here, Zhang et al.show dispensing of viscous droplets down to attolitre in a controllable way.
43 citations
TL;DR: A weighting based velocity constructing method inspired from the conjugate gradient method is presented to avoid performing finite element thermal analysis for solving the generalized Hamilton–Jacobi equation.
10 citations
15 Dec 2016
TL;DR: This paper presents a method for mathematically formulating the compliant mechanisms topology optimization problem aimed at automatically eliminating the de facto hinges by using the weighting method.
Abstract: This paper presents a method for mathematically formulating the compliant mechanisms topology optimization problem aimed at automatically eliminating the de facto hinges. The underlying idea is to augment the traditional kinematic objective with a difference between two cases of output displacements of the mechanism: one without spring and one with. A formulation is developed by using the weighting method. An adaptive scheme for setting the weighting factor is proposed. Several numerical examples are studied to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.